OF
CHILD LIFE IN ENGLAND.
BY
REV. BENJAMIN WAUGH,
HONORARY DIRECTOR OF THE NATIONAL SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF
CRUELTY TO CHILDREN.
Head Office and Shelter:
7 HARPUR STREET, THEOBALD'S ROAD, LONDON.
1889.
[Illustration: THE STEP-CHILD.]
SOME CONDITIONS OF CHILD LIFE IN ENGLAND.
[_A Paper read by_ REV. BENJAMIN WAUGH _at the Meeting of the Baptist
Union, Thursday, October 10, 1889, at Birmingham._]
My subject is Some Conditions of Child Life in England. And ought we not
to expect some of these to be sad? No one who reflects can fail to see the
fact that in this country to-day many conditions contribute to make
ill-living people; and to make them regard children as nuisances. Vagrant
habits; gambling; extravagant self-indulgence; idleness; unmarried
parentage, and unfaithfulness in married parents; habitual
drunkenness--all these disturb, and some destroy, the natural parental
instinct. There is, too, a growing anti-population theory of which we have
not heard much, but which is a kind of open secret, which regards that man
as a fool who said of children, "Blessed is the man that hath his quiver
full of them," and the statement of the Prayer Book Marriage Service as to
the divine objects of marriage as shameful and degrading. Because the
results of all wrong and sinful life in man fall heaviest upon his God and
his children, we ought to be prepared to find calamities which follow
conditions like these, and to deal with them. They all tend to hurt
children, chiefly the youngest.
Side by side with these conditions there is an increasing tendency to
regard human beings as protoplasm; to shake off the idea of Jesus as to a
living God, the Father of us all, and to account for human life by
molecules; to count His judgment day and a supreme judge of robust and
wholesome righteousness as superstitions. And this is all full of danger
to child life. Child life and happiness are bound up with the Kingship of
God. There is but one Supreme to whom they are "the greatest;" but one
hand which has a millstone for the necks of those who offend them, and the
depths of the sea. Church-goers and chapel-goers may sin against
childhood, and men who disclaim churches and chapels may love it. But,
though no hard-and-fast line can be drawn between men on this ground, it
remains certain that Jesus is the world's most august protector of a
child. The man who leaves its limbs naked, its sickness untended, He sends
down to hell.