Your ShelfYour Projects

Some Sensible Remarks

20%

Publishing Committee · Rochester, N. Y. · Aug 7, 1855

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 7, No. 3.

Read the full edition

Some Sensible Remarks.

A CORRESPONDENT of one of the N. Y. Journals, writing from St. Louis, and in attendance on the Anniversary Meeting of the Presbyterian General Assembly there, makes the following suggestive remarks:
It is getting to be an immense job for a sojourner in our large towns to find his way to a house of God —and as to poor residents, (Heaven take care of and save them!) if the doctrine be true that there is no salvation out of the church, the poor people are inevitably lost, for they can neither buy nor hire a pew in these hundred thousand dollar churches. Gentility is fast getting to be the only passport to heaven—as the depths of a man's purse, so are his chances for future glory. This new church stands in the centre of acres of vacant lots, huge piles of building materials lying around as far as the eye can reach, with only here and there a brick block or single house rising above the dreary desolation. These piles of sand, these scattered pillars, pediments capitals, these huge layers of rock and solid and immense cubes of unlaid brick induce one to imagine himself transported to the sites of the famous ruins of Grecian, Roman and Egyptian cities, where storms, fires and earthquakes for 4000 years or more have been scattering their debris over the now solitary plain.
What are we respectable Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, and others, doing for the poor whom we have always with us? We are leaving them to be taken care of by Methodists and Catholics who being poor themselves must naturally expect to take care of the poor. The touch of the beggar of course will not soil their silks or broadcloths, nor will unfragrant mechanics leave unpleasant stenches in their damask pews.
When will our city ministers believe the word they preach, that the poor are God's chosen people? When will they have the moral courage to take the hand of a poor man in the street, and say as Moses to Hobab, 'Come with us and we will do thee good.'