Chapter 33

SERMON XXXIII. HUMAN SOOT

Preached for the Kirkdale Ragged Schools, Liverpool, 1870.

St Matt, xviii. 14. "It is not the will of your Father which is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish."

I am here to plead for the Kirkdale Industrial Ragged School, and Free School-room Church. The great majority of children who attend this school belong to the class of "street arabs," as they are now called; and either already belong to, or are likely to sink into, the dangerous classes--professional law-breakers, profligates, and barbarians. How these children have been fed, civilized, christianized, taught trades and domestic employments, and saved from ruin of body and soul, I leave to you to read in the report. Let us take hold of these little ones at once. They are now soft, plastic, mouldable; a tone will stir their young souls to the very depths, a look will affect them for ever. But a hardening process has commenced within them, and if they are not seized at once, they will become harder than adamant; and then scalding tears, and the most earnest trials, will be all but useless.

This report contains full and pleasant proof of the success of the schools; but it contains also full proof of a fact which is anything but pleasant--of the existence in Liverpool of a need for such an institution. How is it that when a ragged school like this is opened, it is filled at once: that it is enlarged year after year, and yet is filled and filled again? Whence comes this large population of children who are needy, if not destitute; and who are, or are in a fair way to become, dangerous? And whence comes the population of parents whom these children represent? How is it that in Liverpool, if I am rightly informed, more than four hundred and fifty children were committed by the magistrates last year for various offences; almost every one of whom, of course, represents several more, brothers, sisters, companions, corrupted by him, or corrupting him. You have your reformatories, your training ships, like your Akbar, which I visited with deep satisfaction yesterday--institutions which are an honour to the town of Liverpool, at least to many of its citizens. But how is it that they are ever needed? How is it--and this, if correct, or only half correct, is a fact altogether horrible--that there are now between ten and twelve thousand children in Liverpool who attend no school--twelve thousand children in ignorance of their duty to God and man, in training for that dangerous class, which you have, it seems, contrived to create in this once small and quiet port during a century of wonderful prosperity. And consider this, I beseech you--how is it that the experiment of giving these children a fair chance, when it is tried (as it has been in these schools) has succeeded? I do not wonder, of course, that it has succeeded, for I know Who made these children, and Who redeemed them, and Who cares for