Preached in St. Paul's Cathedral on Sunday afternoon, the 27th April, being the third Sunday after Easter, 1890, on the text, Acts x, v. 38: "Who went about doing good." Excerpted (pp.56-63), formatted and illustrated for this website by Jacqueline Banerjee.
t has been said that Christ our Lord was the first Social Reformer. If by social reform be meant the doing away with all inequalities between classes, or even the removal from human life of the permanent cause of a great deal of physical suffering, it cannot be said that this description of Him is accurate. He showed no wish whatever, in any sort of way, to interfere with the existing structure of society. He insisted on Caesar's claim to tribute — He prescribed obedience to Scribes and Pharisees who sat at Moses' seat. He found a [56/57] great deal of distress in the world, and He left a great deal of distress; He found a great deal of poverty, and He left a great deal of poverty. He predicted: "In the world ye shall have tribulation." He announced: "The poor ye have always with you." His real work was to point to truths and to a life which made the endurance of poverty and distress for a short time here so easy as to be in the estimate of real disciples comparatively unimportant; but, at the same time, He relieved so much of it as would enable human beings to make a real step forward towards the true end of their existence. If our Lord was not, in the restricted modem sense, the first social reformer. He was undoubtedly, in the true and ample sense of the word, the first Philanthropist. He loved man as man — He loved not one part but the whole of man. He loved man as none had ever loved him before or since — He died for the being whom He loved so well.
And when our Lord had left the heart, the spirit of His work became that of the Christian Church. It too, after its measure, went about the world doing good. The New Testament guides us through the first stage of the subject. The seven deacons were ordained shortly after Pentecost in order to relieve the Apostles of the work of "serving tables," that is the administration of the public alms. The wealthier Churches of Greece were directed to lay by small offerings every Sunday, so that when the Apostle came by to fetch the collection the money might be ready for the poor Churches in Palestine. The poorer members of the Church were regularly supplied with food at the Agape, or love feast. Widows were especially provided for. Private Christians received orphans into their houses. The duty of hospitality, that is the entertainment of foreign Christians when travelling, is insisted on again and again in the Apostolic Epistles. Gaius is said, in St. John's third Epistle, to have dealt faithfully with the members of the Church and strangers, in contrast with Diotrephes, who neglected these duties. A bishop is required in this sense "to be given to hospitality," and the action of Christian charity is especially observable in the case of slaves. The Apostles made no effort to emancipate them. St. Paul advises the slave, instead of asking for freedom, to make good use of his condition as a slave, but the slave knows that he is our Lord's freeman, and the freeman [57/58] who is his master, if he be a Christian, knows himself to be Christ's slave. And thus Christian charity united the slave and the master, it united the Jewish and the Gentile Churches, it healed social sores, and it diffused material comfort as well as spiritual happiness.
The third-century St Christina giving her father's jewels to the poor, in Evelyn De Morgan's painting of 1904.
It would be impossible here and now to notice the various activities of Christian work in the primitive times which followed the apostolic age. Early in the third century, if not in the second, there were houses for the reception of poor widows: orphans were brought up at the expense of the Church by the bishop or by some private person. Thus, for instance, after the martyrdom of Leonidas at Alessandria, the boy, who became the celebrated Origen, was brought up by a pious woman who lived in the city, and an excellent man, Severus, is named as having devoted himself in Palestine to the education of all children — they were a considerable number — whose parents were martyrs. In the middle of the third century the Roman empire was afflicted by a pestilence which, according to the historian, Gibbon, destroyed not less than half the population. It broke out at Carthage while St. Cyprian was still alive. There was a general panic; all the heathen that could do so fled, they avoided contact with infected persons, they left their own relations to die alone.
Corpses were lying unburied about the streets, and there were rogues who seized the opportunity of making horrible profits. Cyprian summoned the Christians to aid him in doing all that could be done. He was everywhere encouraging, advising, organising, helping the sick and dying with his own hands, and each man under him had, and knew that he had his appointed task. Some of the Christians were anxious to confine their aid to their fellow-believers; their feelings against the heathen had been irritated by a recent persecution, and they knew that another persecution was impending; but they received no countenance fron their bishop. "If," exclaimed St. Cyprian, in a sermon preached at this crisis, "if we only do good to those who do good to us, what do we more than the heathen and the publicans? if we are the children of God, Who makes His sun to shine upon the good and the bad, and sends His rain on the just and on the unjust, let us now prove it by our own acts, let us bless those who curse us, let us do good to those who persecute us." [58/59]
One class of persons who were especial objects of primitive Christian charity were those who were sent to work in the mines. They were almost naked, they had the scantiest supply of food, they were often treated with great cruelty by the inspectors of public works. We find from the letters of St. Cyprian these poor people were special objects of his attention; he regularly sent them supplies by the hands of a trusted sub-deacon; and he wrote to them continually, assuring them of his sympathy and his prayers. And another work of mercy in which the primitive Church especially interested itself was the improvement of the condition of prisoners. The prisons in old Rome were crowded with persons of all descriptions — prisoners of war, especially after the barbarian inroads, prisoners for the non-payment of taxes and for debt-— subjects on which the Roman law was very severe — prisoners for the various kinds of felony, and, when a persecution was going on, prisoners for the crime of being Christians. These unhappy people were huddled together, it is little to say, with no attention to the laws of health or to the decencies of life, and one of the earliest forms of Christian charity was to raise funds for the redemption of prisoners. Early writers like Ignatius of Antioch mention the liberation of prisoners by payment as a specially Christian form of mercy. Cyprian raised large sums from his flock to purchase freedom for prisoners of war.
The Solitary Prisoner, by Marcus Stone (1874).
It would be impossible within our limits to do any sort of justice to this vast subject — the manner in which the ancient Church of Christ carried on, both in the higher and the lower senses of the term, her Master's work of doing good. But the last-named particular, her care for prisoners, naturally leads us to think of a great man who died exactly a century ago, and who ought not to be unmentioned at some time during this current year from this pulpit, since his monument is a familiar object to all who visit and worship in St. Paul's. In the whole course of history few men have done so much to relieve human suffering as the reformer of prisons, John Howard. In this great task he was not first in the field, for in the first year of the last century the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge appointed a committee to inspect and report upon the London prisons, and the chairman of that committee. Dr. Bray, a man eminent for other good works, published an instructive essay on the subject of prison reform.
[59/60] But these efforts did not, it must be confessed, succeed in influencing public opinion, until Howard in his own person regularly visited the prisons throughout the country, published accounts of what he witnessed, and left no means untried to bring about an improved condition of things. Howard's journals show that he was by no means an inequitable fanatic bent on drawing an uniformly gloomy picture. He makes the best of everything he can, as for instance of the kindness of a prison chaplain at Ipswich, but the general tenor of his accounts would appear to us at the present day quite incredible.
It is difEcult to believe that such a dungeon as "The Chink" at Plymouth existed in the days of George III, and "The Chink" was only an extreme sample of the arrangements which were largely prevalent throughout the country. Howard penetrated everywhere, observed everything, recorded all that he observed, cross-questioned everybody — prisoners, jailors, magistrates. Everybody bent instinctively to the moral authority of his pure disinterestedness, and he gained increased authority by his resolute abstinence from any trace of exaggeration. All that bore upon health, upon morality, upon decency, upon self-respect, was carefuly recorded, and he left no means untried to promote improvements. After he had visited the country jails in England, he went through Scotland once and again with the same object; then through Ireland ; then, in 1775, he began his great series of visits to the Continent. His practice of bestowing alms upon prisoners obtained for him at that time access to the country prisons in Fiance. He endeavoured, but in vain, to explore the seerets of the Bastile. With this single purpose he visited Belgium, Holland, Germany, Switzerland — especially Urselburg, Brunswick, Berlin, Bâle. At Vienna his plain-spokenness nearly got him into trouble at Court. Thence he made his way through Gratz, Lombardy, Trieste, and Venice, where he visited the cells under the leads and the dungeons below the water-level which the poetry of Samuel Rogers has made familiar to many of us, and then to Padua, Florence, Rome, Naples, and at a later date he explored — not seldom at the risk of his life, and, in those days of bad travelling, with extraordinary difficulty — Spain and Portugal, Poland and Russia — even Turkey and the Eastern Archipelago.
Left two: Memorial for John Howard, by John Bacon the Younger (1777-1859), 1795, in St. Paul's Cathedral. Right: maquette for Alfred Gilbert's statue of Howard in Market Square, Bedford, c. 1890 (around th time this sermon was preached).
He died at Cherson, on the shores of the Black Sea, in [60/61] January, 1790, true to the last to the great purpose of his life, and he was buried with the service of the Church of England with every demonstration of respect and honour that the army and people of Russia could offer him. His monument was the first that was admitted to a place within this cathedral, and at the instance of Dr. Samuel Johnson. He had declined a public statue while living: his real monument is the record of his life. In the memorable words of Edmund Burke, "This gentleman visited all Europe, not to survey the sumptuousness of palaces or the stateliness of temples, but to dive into the depths of dungeons, to plunge into the infection of hospitals, to take the gauge and dimensions of human misery, to remember the forgotten, to attend to the neglected."
There are two lessons which Howard teaches us more especially. The first: Howard was a philanthropist because he was a religious man. In the last century a great school of writers, especially in France, endeavoured to treat philanthropy as a virtue which has no connection with religion, — indeed, as a virtue which was an effective rival of religion, as being at once more practical and not encumbered by a supernatural creed. Howard, the greatest philanthropist of the century, gives no countenance to this idea. His Journals show him to have been a deeply religious man, who drew all the governing and guiding motives for his exertions from his religious convictions. The English Church cannot claim him as one of her sons; he belonged to a body of independent Dissenters at Bedford, and at one time he was powerfully attracted by the simplicity of life and by the active benevolence of the Quakers. But he always entertained friendly feelings towards the Church, and in his last hours he desired that her Burial Service might be read over his grave. We Churchmen can only wish that, being what he was, he had been, one of ourselves, in one sense for his own sake, in another for our own. That he was profoundly influenced in all the actions of his life by the spirit and example of our Lord and Saviour, that he obeyed the will of Jesus Christ so far as he knew it with touching fidelity, is altogether beyond dispute.<>/p>
Few men have had a better right to say "The love of Christ constraineth me," or have done more to convince the world, by the force of a splendid example, that philanthropy [61/62] is a flower that grows naturally on the tree of deep personal religious conviction.
And a second lesson which Howard's life teaches us is the importance of concentrating thought and strength on any good work which we are led to take in hand, Howard did so much, he was so widely influential, because he was what would be called, perhaps disparagingly, "a man of one idea" — the miseries of existing prison life not only in his own country but throughout the world. He knew that our human powers, whether of thought or of action, are after all very limited, and that, if any serious task has to be attempted, they must be used economically and made the best of. Howard allowed nothing to interfere with his efforts to improve the condition of prisoners. He would decline invitations, sometimes he would not look at a newspaper, lest his mind should be diverted from the duties of that day with reference to the great object ot his life. He was alive to, but he was impatient of, the charms of art and of scenery. He was desirous, and yet neglectful, of opportunities for recreation. When at Wilton he would not divert his attention from the jail at Salisbury in order to visit the great mansion of the Herberts. When in Rome he would not even allow himself the necessary time to inspect the splendid ruins which distinguish the capital of the ancient world. This rigid unity of purpose makes his journals somewhat monotonous, and, from a literary point of view, disappointing. "Prisons, prisons, prisons," is always the burden of his tale, but at the same time it shows the secret of his success under unparalleled difficulties. He revolutionised the opinion, not only of England, but of Europe, as to the treatment of criminals. In one of the hospitals at Rome he read with delight a famous sentence which proclaimed the principle which already lay nearest to his heart, the principle that it is a poor thing to visit the bad with punishment unless you can also do something to improve them by discipline.
That there is still much to be done in order to give full effect to the truth that punishment should be remedial as well as penal is true enough, but that the principle is now, not merely inscribed on the walls of a charitable institution, but generally recognised throughout the civilised world, is very largely indeed the work of Howard. If it should be thought that in some particulars Howard carried his concen [62/63] tration of thought and effort to an extreme, there can be no doubt whatever that the absence of such concentration is one reason why in our day so many promising lives, so many bright thoughts, so many good resolves, lead to so little, lead to nothing. The temptations to dissipation of interest are greater now than they were a century ago. Facilities for travelling, the great multitude of books and newspapers brought within everybody's reach, and, it may be added, something in the temper of the time, all have the effect of leading the mind to pass rapidly, too rapidly, from one subject to another, and to give itself thoroughly to none. Some of us may have a greater breadth of interest, a wider outlook, more varied cultivation than had John Howard, but yet we may pass through life without doing a twentieth part of what he did for the good of man and for the glory of God.
No doubt he was in easy circumstances, without beng wealthy, but what he had to give he gave with all his heart, he gave it to an object of immense importance. We may have more time and means, we may have less, than he had, but a young man or woman on the threshold of life cannot do better than consider what he or she can do that will glorify God and do good to man, and then, in old words, "turn all the desires of the heart that way." The most unshowing and unromantic methods of doing good may be the most acceptable. To work at a night-school, to keep the accounts of a charity, to get up Sunday breakfasts for poor people, may mean more in the eyes of the Infinite Mercy than to dispose of immense charitable resources, or even to be a great teacher or ruler in the Church. The vital condition of doing good, whether it be spiritual or physical good, is that simple unity of purpose which springs from disinterestedness, and this can best be learned at His blessed feet Who remains the first and the greatest of philanthropists, since in life and in death He gave Himself for us, that whether we wake or sleep we might live together with Him.
Links to Related Material
- Henry Parry Liddon, D.D., D.C.L., Chancellor and Canon of St. Paul's
- "The Victory That Overcometh the World" (excerpt from one of the sermons delivered at St Paul's)
Bibliography
Canon Liddon: A Memoir..... London: Office of The Family Churchman, 1890: 5-12, in the Internet Archive, from a copy in Harvard University Library. Web. 4 November 2023.
Created 4 November 2023