p. 67 | A REMARKABLE PLAN

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Feb 4, 1889

A REMARKABLE PLAN.

THE questions of "how to reach the masses," and "how to get people to attend church," are, it seems, still live topics in New York; and a correspondent of the Evening Post of that city has offered, presumably as a solution of the latter problem, the suggestion that the rich men in the "large and handsome churches pay for a number of the best seats in the church, and have them reserved especially for the poorer people." "Only think," says he, "of the immense delight and privilege to a poor person to sit in a front pew, to hear the delightful music, to join in the beautiful service, and to feel himself a member of that great congregation—the church as free, as home-like to him as to the rich man whose noble thoughtfulness and whose bounty made the seat a free one!"

It is then suggested that the rich men would themselves sit in the "more obscure places," and this the Post's correspondent is sure would "so touch the hearts of the poor that they would rush to the churches to enjoy the boon."

Commenting upon this suggestion, the New York Sun says the following very sensible things:—

"Very likely many of them would come, but they would be only from among those of the poor who are willing to put their poverty on exhibition for pay—the tramps, the bummers, the dead beats, the beggars, and the imposters. If the rich Christians, besides reserving the front seats for them, should offer to each a dollar a Sunday, the fashionable churches might be filled as never before. Otherwise the plan would not work.

"The trouble with the system of hiring pews at high prices in fashionable churches is that it involves a discrimination between the rich and the poor, which does such violence to the whole theory of Christianity that the simplest see its inconsistency. Yet the plan proposed by the Evening Post's correspondent tends to emphasize the distinction. The poor are made dependent on the bounty of the rich, and their poverty becomes the more conspicuous in a place where all should be alike before God, and rich or poor only according to the measure of their spiritual worth.

"It makes no difference whether the rich occupy the front seats and the poor the back seats, or the rich the back seats and the poor the front seats. The line of distinction between them is drawn all the same, except that in the latter case the degradation of the poor would be more striking. They would be in the front seats because they were poor, and the rich would be behind them because they were rich. The fashionable pews would then be those in the 'obscure places,' since to occupy a conspicuous seat would be for a man to advertise his poverty and his inferiority in the social scale.

"Of course the self-respecting poor could never be induced to go to church on any such conditions. If they are to accept 'bounty' in God's house, they want it to be God's, and not man's, bounty. They do not want to be reminded, and to have everybody else reminded, when they go up to pray, that they are a class by themselves, and that even the privilege of religious worship is obtained by them only at the cost of those who have more money than they.

"Yet the dense ignorance of human nature displayed by the author of this plan is common enough in the churches of which he speaks, and it explains why they are unable to reach the great body of the people."