I have received your letter of yesterday's date, and shall content
myself with a brief reply.
There was a long time during which benevolent societies were spending
immense sums on missions abroad, when there was no such thing as a
ragged school in England, or any kind of associated endeavour to
penetrate to those horrible domestic depths in which such schools are
now to be found, and where they were, to my most certain knowledge,
neither placed nor discovered by the Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel in Foreign Parts.
If you think the balance between the home mission and the foreign
mission justly held in the present time, I do not. I abstain from
drawing the strange comparison that might be drawn between the sums even
now expended in endeavours to remove the darkest ignorance and
degradation from our very doors, because I have some respect for
mistakes that may be founded in a sincere wish to do good. But I present
a general suggestion of the still-existing anomaly (in such a paragraph
as that which offends you), in the hope of inducing some people to
reflect on this matter, and to adjust the balance more correctly. I am
decidedly of opinion that the two works, the home and the foreign, are
_not_ conducted with an equal hand, and that the home claim is by far
the stronger and the more pressing of the two.
Indeed, I have very grave doubts whether a great commercial country,
holding communication with all parts of the world, can better
Christianise the benighted portions of it than by the bestowal of its
wealth and energy on the making of good Christians at home, and on the
utter removal of neglected and untaught childhood from its streets,
before it wanders elsewhere. For, if it steadily persist in this work,
working downward to the lowest, the travellers of all grades whom it
sends abroad will be good, exemplary, practical missionaries, instead of
undoers of what the best professed missionaries can do.
These are my opinions, founded, I believe, on some knowledge of facts
and some observation. If I could be scared out of them, let me add in
all good humour, by such easily-impressed words as "antichristian" or
"irreligious," I should think that I deserved them in their real
signification.
I have referred in vain to page 312 of "Household Words" for the sneer
to which you call my attention. Nor have I, I assure you, the least idea
where else it is to be found.