Forty Years' Recollections

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XIII. MISSION WORK IX BETHNAL GREEN. I Was acquainted at this time with a young' curate, with whem I had somo time boforo made a pedestrian tour through somo of the most beautiful portions of the beautiful county of Kent, and who had lately exchanged his first curacy at Haverstock Hill for a similar engagement in the district of SL Philip, Bcthnal Green. On tho occasion of my first visit to him after this change, our conversation turned upon hemo missions, and I was led to make some remarks, derived from my own observation, upon the incompetency of many of thc Beripture-readora, whose mission-fields were the' industrial quarters of our large towns, for the accomplishment of the end for which they wero appointed. They may be tolerably well qualified to deal with the indifferent and the ignorant, I observed; but they are utterly incompetent to remove the doubts or meet the arguments of the many intelligentmen to bo found in largo towns who reject the ISible as a divine revelation. They way be useful nn.xiliaries of the clergy in visiting the poor inein- Ihts of u congregation, and tolerably successful in bringing into the fold of the Chureh the ignorant and the indifferent; but they don't realize my idea nf whut a Christian missionary in the homo field hhould Ihi in tin ngc like the present. There is great difliculty in obtaining men whe would, returned the curate. It is true they are not very highly paid; but many of them, notably those employed by the City Missionary Society, are as well paid as a largo proportion of curates, whe are drawn from a higher and more educated class. The Churehes, said I, in continuance of the thought that was in my mind, send to the ignorant heathen of Africa and Malaysia men qualified by education for the ministr...