There are still two parts of the work of the Salvationists to
consider—their work with the inmates of the prisons, and their work with
the inmates of the brothels. Here again we have everything to learn
from them, from them the true disciples of “the divine Communist.” The
former work they have made a speciality of, and they are rapidly making
the latter. I doubt very much that our churches and chapels (I am not
speaking now of the Catholics, whose work is almost exclusively among the
Irish, and the Irish are of a race that, save in the matter of agrarian
crime and a curious cruelty to dumb animals, is truly admirable for the
honesty of its men and the chastity of its women): I doubt very much,
I say, that our churches and chapels will ever get much at either the
criminals or the prostitutes. Our clergymen, who are so gentlemanly, and
our ministers who are so respectable, can neither speak nor understand
much the language of the People, the language of the heart. The clergymen
are shocked by the foulness, the ministers by the ferocity, of the
People. Both feel that they are condescending—the one from the height of
refinement, the other from the height of righteousness. The people has no
love for condescension of this sort. There are few words that stink more
in its nostrils than that of charity, and indeed charity, when it means a
gift from a superior to an inferior, is hateful enough. It is a popular
delusion with the “charitable” that street beggars and the inmates of
the workhouses are the People. Far otherwise is it, O “charitable” ones:
these are not independent animals, they are parasites: they are (if you
will pardon me saying so) your spiritual lice; so please make the best of
them, since it is not only on account of, but _on_, you that they live.
Well, now, wherein is it that these fanatical ignorant Salvationists _do_
get at the People? One of them answers us at once: “_No one’s too wicked
for Jesus, and so no one’s too wicked for me who am the simple follower
of Jesus._ If _he_ could do with publicans and harlots, why cannot I?”
They say, as Walt Whitman says to “a common prostitute,”
“Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you,
Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves to rustle
for you, do my words refuse to glisten and rustle for you.”
This, you see, is Religious Socialism. It proclaims the spiritual
equality of all men. The _spiritual_ equality, let us notice; it will
have nothing to do with the social equality. “_My kingdom is not of
this world.... Give unto Cæsar the things which be Cæsar’s, and to God
the things which be God’s._” “Honour all men,” says Peter, “love the
brotherhood, fear God, honour the king.” And more: Religious Socialism
has a tendency to be careless of the dogmas of the creeds. “Is the Army
hostile,” asks Mr. Booth, “to the existing evangelical denominations?
Just the contrary. Numbers of its converts go to swell the membership
of the churches. More than 400 persons, converted and trained in its
ranks, have been engaged by other different religious organisations
as Evangelists, Ministers,” etc., etc., etc. We notice that he says
“_evangelical_ denominations?” The Catholics, of course, from (who shall
I say?) Augustine to Pascal and Newman, are poor belated idolaters, only
slightly better than the heathen. This, you see, is where Mr. Booth,
like Mr. Spurgeon and the rest, so pleasantly shows us what nonsense an
earnest short-sighted man is capable of believing and brandishing about
the world with a godless blatancy. Personally, I cannot make myself angry
with any of them for it. For what would an earnest man be without his
faults? without, as D’Israeli puts it, a single redeeming vice?
In Melbourne there is a tendency now to let the Salvation Army have its
own way unmolested with the criminals and the prostitutes. “It can’t
do any harm,” people say, “and it may do good, and really, you know,
the—the Social Evil wants looking to.” Nay, more: having made this
nice expression “Social Evil,” we are at last plucking up courage to
acknowledge that it exists, and that it is not necessarily a sign of
filthy-mindedness to wish to discuss it. We speak of it now in papers
which come under the eye of those dear creatures about whose stainless
purity of mind we are all so anxious (even that Puritanic print, the
_Melbourne Bulletin_ is anxious, and the _Sydney Bulletin_, also, for
all I know to the contrary)—“our wives and daughters.” Why, possibly
there are those among us who will live to see the day when the expression
“fearful sinner,” as applied to some poor girl driven out into the
miseries of the streets, will be confined to the utterance of our good
friends of the Scotch Presbytery, and other few such like. Then, it will
be amusing: at present, it is only detestable.