Dr Thomas Guthrie on Wisely Considering the Case of the Poor

William Carey, the great missionary, when leaving for India in 1793 said 'I'll go down into the pit, if you will hold the rope.'   When Dr Thomas Guthrie was called to Old Greyfriars, Edinburgh in 1837 from his country charge of Arbirlot he said something similar when comparing the difference between his two charges; 'I can compare it to nothing else than the change from green fields and woods and the light of nature to venturing into the darkness and blackness of a coal pit.'

Throughout his whole ministry Guthrie took a great interest in the poor of his parish - primarily, although not exclusively, in the overcrowded Cowgate.  Even before arriving in Edinburgh Guthrie believed a minister should live amongst his people; 'Now, I should like a clergyman never to step out of his own door but he steps in amongst his people.  I would have him planted in the very centre of his population' (letter to Mr Dunlop in 1837).  Initially Guthrie lived in Argyll Square and then in Brown Square which would have both been where today's Chamber Street is as can be seen from this old map.  It is hard to imagine the squalor and poverty that Guthrie saw on a daily basis as he visited his parish.  He recounts his early days; 'I can never forget, nothing can efface the impression made on my mind, when I first lifted the veil from the hideous veil of starvation and sin that lay before me. The scenes that I was called on to witness the first three or four days of my parochial visitations almost drove sleep from my pillow.  They haunted me like very sceptres, and, after visiting till my heart was very sick, I have come up from the College Wynd with the idea that I might as well have gone to be a missionary among the Hindoos on the banks of the Ganges.'

Dr Guthrie was no ivory tower minister.  He was the embodiment of salt pressed against the decaying flesh of the world around him.  This came at a heavy price with Guthrie's future health problems.  He became a magnet for his parishioners seeking temporal and spiritual help on a daily basis; 'My door used to be besieged every day by crowds of half-naked creatures, men, women, and children, shivering with cold and hunger; and I visited many a house that winter, where there was a starving mother and starving children, and neither bed, bread nor Bible - till, with climbing stairs my limbs were like to fail, and with spectacles of misery, my heart was like to break.'So how did Guthrie respond to all the challenges around him?

His starting point was that man is made in the image of God.  The half naked child sleeping on the streets of Edinburgh was, to Guthrie, as precious in the sight of God as the Queen on the throne. In his first plea for Ragged Schools in 1847 he compared what some regarded as 'rubbish' as shining jewels; 'Yes it is easy to push aside the poor boy in the street, with a harsh and unfeeling refusal, saying to your neighbour, "These are the pests of the city."  Call them, if you choose, the rubbish of society; only let us say, that there are jewels among that rubbish, which would richly repay the expense of searching.  Bedded in their dark and dismal abodes, precious stones lie there, which only wait to be dug out and polished, to shine, first on earth, and hereafter and forever in a redeemers crown.'  Our response to poverty will depend on our starting point.  If we see people with honour and dignity, made in the image of God, our response will be full of compassion and we will seek to go the extra mile.  If we see people as economic units as George Osborne does, our response will be very different.

Secondly, Guthrie took sin seriously.  He was no socialist.  He knew that little is achieved by the mass and indiscriminate distribution of money or food.  Sinful nature often makes a bad situation worse as Guthrie found on his many pastoral visits.  Poor families with little we're ravaged further my a drunken or profligate parent.  This was the time of the 'dram houses' and 'gin palaces'. Indiscriminate (however well meaning) compassion often compounds problems rather than solving them. If you need any evidence of this just look at Africa and the billions spent my Western aid agencies with little long lasting effect.  For more on this read 'When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor and Yourself' by Corbett and Fikkert.  In believing in original sin as the source of society's problems, Guthrie responded, as we shall see next, in a gospel centred way.

Thirdly, Guthrie believed in the 'almost omnipotent power of Christian kindness'.  Our response to poverty needs to be gospel centred.  Guthrie knew that compassion without the power of the gospel would change little.  Only the grace of God can truly change the human heart.  We get a flavour of Guthrie's view of poverty in his great work 'Seed Time and Harvest of Ragged Schools' (published 1847, 1849 and 1860).  Having outlined the plight of thousands of 'ragged children' on the streets of Edinburgh he famously said 'These Arabs of the city are as wild of those of the desert, and must be broken into three habits, - those of discipline, learning, and industry, not to speak of cleanliness.  To accomplish this, our trust is in the almost omnipotent power of Christian kindness.  Harsh words and harder blows are thrown away here.'  The ragged school model sought to work with families by offering the children a comprehensive system of education, food and industrial training during the day while encouraging the children to return home in the evening.  The aim of the ragged school was to teach young people how to survive and thrive.  Unlike today's welfare state it did not crush people under the weight of a faceless and unresponsive bureaucracy.  Christian compassion needs to be personal, genuine and it needs to go 'above and beyond'.

Fourthly, Guthrie's response went to the root of the problem.  His response to poverty was what might be termed today 'tough love'.  He sought to restore self respect, hard work and sobriety.  While he had all the time in the world for the innocent victims of drunkenness and poverty he was very outspoken against those who perpetuated their poverty through vice.  He had no time for encouraging laziness or indolence through well meaning compassion; 'The money which is lavished on sturdy beggars, on the wasteful slaves of vice, on the reckless and improvident, you have no right to expect repayment of.  These are not the poor.  On the contrary they plunder the poor, and prey on poverty; and hardening men's hearts by their frauds, improvidence, crimes and detected impostures, against the claims of real poverty, they deserve not charity but chastisement.  It is a scandal and a shame that such devouring locusts are permitted to infest our city and swarm in its streets.  These vices of a system which the police stangely tolerate, and our charity unwisely maintains, are visible in the botched and brazened features of those thriving solicitors.  The very breath with which they whine for charity smells of the dram shop.  It poisons and pollutes the air; and those who contribute to foster this profligate system have no claim to the blessing.'  The Victorians often receive a bad press for their view of the 'deserving' and 'undeserving' poor but how can it be compassion to prop up a man or woman's vice while their children starve?   Welfare must always be a hand up not a hand out.  This is surely the principle of 2 Thess 3 v 10.  If a man is able to work, and work is available, our whole system of welfare should be focussed on helping him work.

Finally, Guthrie wasn't interested in 'harm minimisation' or 'risk management'.  His focus was on transformation. This final quote perhaps best sums up Guthrie's views.  It encourages us to have a 'wise' response to the poor.  

'Blessed is he that wisely doth

The poor man's case consider'

'So run the opening words of the 41st Psalm, in the Scottish Psalter.  Wisely?  He wisely considers the case of the poor who, wherever it is possible, supplies them with work rather than money; who helps them to help themselves, who encourages them to self-exertion, and teaches them self respect; who patronises not indolence but industry, not the intemperate but the sober; who applies his money to relieve the misfortunes that come from the hand of Providence, rather than such as are the divinely ordained and salutary penalties of vice.  And who thus goes to the work of Christian benevolence will meet with many cases to cheer him on, and keep him up to this mark, "Be not weary in well-doing."

This is the challenge for the church today.  As Bryant Myers says in his book Walking with the Poor; 'Poverty is the result of relationships that do not work, that are not just, that are not for life, that are not harmonious or enjoyable.  Poverty is the absence of shalom in all its meanings.'  Poverty is not just about money.  It is about lacking the networks and relationships that can lift us up when we fall.  This is where the church needs to be - to go beyond relief and an emergency response to poverty and walk with the poor in the long and often hard journey of discipleship.  What our broken, fractured communities need more than anything is the bread of life, the Lord Jesus Christ. Christian compassion so often compounds the plight of the poor rather than offering a helping hand to a new and better life.  In the Psalmists (and Guthrie's) words we do not 'wisely' consider the poor. Compassion that compounds and excuses sin is not biblical compassion.  We need to feed the hungry but also present Jesus in all his beauty and majesty.

Dr Thomas Guthrie on politics

Dr Thomas Guthrie (1803-1873), as I've said in previous articles on this blog, was one of the last great Christian polymaths of the Victorian era.  He was a preacher, a writer and a social reformer with great influence in the areas of education and politics.  Dr Guthrie did not stray into writing and politics with some guilty notion that he was going 'off piste'. His Christianity was a theology for life and informed every area of society.  Christ is not just the head of the church but he is also King of the nation and his teaching and commands needed to be applied to poverty relief, education and politics.  It is the compartmentalisation of our Christianity into sacred and secular that has led the the Scottish church having a diminishing influence over the last 100 years.

So where did Guthrie stand politically?  Well he was never a party political man despite being on friendly terms with some of the most powerful men and women in the country; Lord Jeffrey, the Duke of Argyll, Lord Southesk, the Right Hon. Fox Maule (Earl of Dalhousie), the Duchess of Sutherland, Dr Tait the Bishop of London and Mr Gladstone.  In 1871 Guthrie was the only dissenting Scottish minister to be invited to the marriage of Princess Louise and the Marquis of Lorne where he was presented to the Queen.  During one of his Ragged School speeches Guthrie spoke of his political views;

'I am a Conservative in conserving all that is good; I am a Liberal in advocating a wise liberality as regards Government funds towards all institutions that aim to make men better, soberer and wiser; and I am a red-hot Radical in seeking to uproot everything tending to disgrace the grand old name of Britain.'

Guthrie was familiar with politics and politicians and made frequent visits to Westminster in the cause of the Ragged Schools.  But Guthrie never had faith in politics to transform a nation as so many people do today.  Indeed he was badly let down by government despite his many powerful friends and great influence.  After giving evidence to a Parliamentary Committee in 1856 the Privy Council decided to provide 50 shillings per year for children from Ragged Schools.  In 1857 this decision was reversed and the funding was reduced to 5 shillings.  Guthrie was understandably angry and said;

'I do not wish to speak evil of dignities, but there are some things in respect of which it is difficult to keep one's temper, and this is one of them.  We have leaned on a broken reed.  For a brief period, in answer to importunity like the widow's, we got fifty shillings a year for every child of the abandoned classes trained within our school - only one third of the cost....It's injustice and folly are still more plainly brought out by the contrast between the liberality shown to those institutions which attempt to reform the child who has committed crime, and the meanness dealt out to such institutions  as ours, that, reckoning prevention better than cure, seek to destroy crime in the very bud.  What a monstrous state of matters!'  (Autobiography and Memoirs, Guthrie and Sons, 1896)

After this there was a deputation to the Privy Council to reconsider in 1859.  Guthrie talks vividly of leading this delegation to London and walking up the street like 'a column of soldiers'.  They met with Mr Adderly in the Treasury building who Guthrie described as 'fighting shy'.  It must have been quite a sight to see Guthrie in full flow and he says he got 'quite animated'!!  The only outcome was the passing of the Industrial School Act in 1860 which gave state assistance to children in ragged schools committed there by magistrates.  A Privy Council report from 1861 recorded that of 6172 children in ragged schools across the UK, only 242 had been committed by magistrates thus the vast majority were supported by voluntary contributions.

At a public meeting convened in Edinburgh in 1860 to consider what steps should be taken to rectify the huge deficit of £700 caused by the withdrawal of the government grant, Dr Norman Macleod said;

'It is monstrous that Government, who would not give sixpence to save a man's leg, would quite willingly give twenty pounds for a wooden one after the leg was taken off.'

Dr Guthrie himself let the government have it with both barrels;

'What I wish the public to understand, is this - you must either help us in our present extremity, or we must cast seventy of these poor children overboard. Now, who is to select these victims?  I will not do it.  I sympathise with Hagar, when after her doing her utmost to sustain her son, she withdrew, not choosing to see him die.  It will be a black day for Edinburgh when these children are cast into the streets.  God says 'Room in heaven for the guilty:'  here they cry, 'Room in the prison for the innocent;' and when these poor creatures have gone their horrid march from our blessed school to yon dreary cells, let them put upon the door of the prison, "Under the patronage of the Privy Council".' 

Guthrie left his most stinging rebuke to the end;  

'I have been three times at Downing Street, and it is a shocking cold place. I have seen a bunch of grapes put into a well, and you took it out, instead of a bunch of grapes it was a bunch of stones.  There are such things as petrifying wells, and I have seen a kind and good hearted man go into office in Downing Street, and the next time I saw him he was as hard as stone.'

He had been to Westminster and pleaded for help with the poor ragged children of Edinburgh.  He had eloquently argued in his 'Plea for Ragged Schools' the value of prevention rather than cure.  But it had all fallen on deaf ears. Thankfully at the meeting in question rather than the £700 that was needed from the good people of Edinburgh they raised a staggering £2200.  One donation of £157 was from domestic servants in Edinburgh.  Another donation came from a farm servant who said; 'I am a poor farm servant, and it is all I can spare at present as I have a widow mother to support and I am the one son.  I do not want my name down in any of the records.'

Dr Guthrie engaged with the government of the day.  He realised the power and influence of politics but he also saw how it could crush the local, and at times more informal compassion that was making a huge difference.  During his evidence to a Commons Committee in 1852 that was set up to enquire into the 'condition of criminal and destitute juveniles in this country', Guthrie made this famous statement which in many ways predicted the next 150 years of welfare provision; 'the practical suggestion that I would make is not that the government should come forward and supersede our local efforts; I should look upon that as a great calamity; I do not wish the government to supersede our efforts but I wish the state to do this, to supplement them.'  It is the superseding of all local and voluntary efforts that have led to so many of the problems we have today.  God's primary welfare state was and is the nuclear and extended family and only as we once again support and encourage God's institution of the family will we see stronger communities.

Guthrie also realised how limited politics was.  It was not the government that was the great motivating power that assisted thousands of desperate and destitute ragged children, it was the power of Christian love and compassion in men like Dr Thomas Guthrie.  Just as in Victorian Scotland, Guthrie's faith was not in politics but in the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and its power to bring spiritual and moral reformation.  Of course we need to engage in politics and more Christians need to stand for parliament.  But what we need most is a spiritual revival in our country and reformation of the church.  We need a radical and yet winsome Christianity best summed up in my favourite Guthrie quote;

'We want a religion that, not dressed for Sundays and walking on stilts, descends into common and everyday life; is friendly, not selfish; courteous, not boorish; generous, not miserly; sanctified, not sour; that loves justice more than gain; and fears God more than man; to quote another's words - "a religion that keeps husbands from being spiteful, or wives fretful; that keeps mothers patient, and children pleasant; that bears heavily not only on the 'exceeding sinfulness of sin,' but on the exceeding rascality of lying and stealing; that banishes small measures from counters, sand from sugar, and water from milk-cans - the faith, in short, whose root is in Christ, and whose fruit is works ." '

Thomas Guthrie, Faith and Works, Man and the Gospel.

A Spark amongst Combustibles - Guthrie publishes 'A Plea for Ragged Schools'

St John's Parish Church, Victoria Street , Edinburgh where Guthrie ministered from 1840-43

Dr Thomas Guthrie is famous for his 'Ragged Schools'.  The schools went on to become a huge movement that saved thousands of children from a life of crime and abuse.  But as with every great movement it had humble beginnings at Guthrie's church plant in Victoria Street in 1840.  They had a huge room in the basement and the elders initially agreed to set up a ragged industrial feeding school for '20-30 waifs'.  As time drew near for the launch the elders took fright and the project was abandoned.  While Guthrie was cast down, and felt like a man who has 'launched a good sturdy boat, sees her before she has taken ten strokes from the shore seized by a mighty billow, flung back, and dashed to pieces on the strand.' 

 

It was this disappointment that led Guthrie to launch a considerably bolder project and he wrote his first 'Plea for Ragged Schools'.  He hoped to stir up the wider Christian public beyond his congregation.  Little did he know what effect this little booklet would have. Writing to a Mr Carment 18 months after he published his booklet Guthrie recounts some of his misgivings and anxiety around the publication; 'I published my Plea with fear and trembling, and but that I was, with yourself, a very vehement advocate of Ragged Schools, I would never have ventured on such a walk.  If a man's fire is kindled and passion up, he'll run along the narrow ledge of a precipice, where, in his cooler, calmer moments, he would not venture to creep'.  This was Guthrie's first publication but it was the start of a long and fruitful career in writing and editing.  When he eventually retired from Free St John's, Edinburgh because of ill health in May 1864, Guthrie was invited to become the editor of the Sunday Magazine which at its height had a circulation of 100,000.  I have written a separate article on the Sunday Magazine here.  Many of Guthrie's serialised articles were republished and made Guthrie a well know author in the second half of the 19th Century.

 

Every great author has to start somewhere but Guthrie had no idea what was to come from this little publication.  Returning home after leaving his manuscript at the printers, Guthrie says; 'Well, what a fool I have made of myself!'  Dr Guthrie had no idea that his little publication was to become the start of a great movement that would impact the lives of thousands of children not just in the United Kingdom but right across the world.  Soon Guthrie's mailbag was full with letters from far and near.  He says; 'I was astonished at the result of my first Plea for Ragged Schools.  It fell as a spark amongst combustibles; it was like a shot fired from the Castle, and it brought me more volunteers to man my boat than she could well carry.' 

 

Like so many authors, Guthrie was astonished at the power of the printed page.  He went on to write a further two 'Plea's' which were eventually published in one book entitled 'Seed Time and Harvest of Ragged Schools'.  This was reviewed by The Times in September 1860 and rightly confirmed Guthrie as the 'Apostle of the Ragged School Movement'.  Guthrie's little booklet was the spark that set off a fire.  His legacy continues even today through our universal education system and welfare system.  Were it not for Christian philanthropists like Guthrie Scotland would be a very different place today. 

Thomas Chalmers and 'A Very Fine Field of Operation'

Having turned the ripe old age of 41 recently I received 'Out of Harness' by Thomas Guthrie.  Published in 1883 (10 years after Guthrie's death) it is a collection of auto-biographical essays.  Of the 20 essays 7 are devoted to his ministry in the Cowgate in Edinburgh and are entitled Sketches of the Cowgate.  Other chapters include The Original Ragged School, New Brighton, A Winter Gale, The Streets of Paris, Sunday in Paris and French Protestantism and several others. 

There are some great quotes in the book particularly about Thomas Chalmers.  Allow me one example; Courted by the great, Chalmers' sympathies lay with the masses. Their oppression roused him like a lion; their neglect stirred his indignation; their sufferings touched his soul with such tender pity that the horrors of the Irish and Highland famines were like to break his heart. He loved mankind. His aspirations were not to drag the upper classes down to the level of the lower, but to improve the economic, educational, moral and religious condition of the lowest stratum of society; and so, as when the base of the pyramid is raised, to raise all the courses of the superstructure up to the royalty - sitting high on the throne (Out of Harness, Dr Thomas Guthrie, p 127).

Dr Thomas Chalmers

One of the main reasons I wanted to get this book was because of the famous conversation between Dr Chalmers and Dr Guthrie in 1837 which is described in the book.  It is often mentioned in Free Church circles and I've always wanted to read it for myself.

 

Thomas Guthrie was called from the sleepy parish of Arbirlot, Angus in 1837 to the bustling city of Edinburgh.  His charge was Old Greyfriars so the Cowgate became his parish.  Guthrie describes his field of service;

The streets were a puddle; the heavy air, loaded with smoke, was thick and murky; right below lay the narrow street of dingy tenements, whose toppling chimneys and patched and battered roofs were apt emblems of the fortunes of most of its tenants.  Of these, some were lying over the sills of windows innocent of glass, or stuffed with old hats and old rags; others, course looking women with squalled children in their arms or at their feet stood in groups at the close-mouths - here with empty laughter chaffing any passing acquaintance - there screaming each other down in a drunken brawl, or standing sullen and silent, with hunger and ill-usage in their saddened looks.  A brewers cart, threatening to crush beneath its ponderous wheels the ragged urchins who had no other playground, rumbled over the causeway - drowning the quavering voice of one whose drooping head and scanty dress were ill in harmony with song, but not drowning the shrill pipe of an Irish girl who thumped the back of an unlucky donkey and cried her herrings at 'three-a-penny' (Out of Harness, Thomas Guthrie, p 126).

 

The narrative continues that as Guthrie stared down on the scene of utter degradation Dr Chalmers came up behind him;

 

Hopeful of success, he surveyed the scene beneath us, and his eye, which often wore a dreamy stare, kindled at the prospect of seeing that wilderness become an Eden, these foul haunts of darkness, drunkenness and disease, changed into "dwellings of the righteous where is heard the voice of melody."  Contemplating the scene for a little in silence, all at once, with his broad Luther-like face glowing with enthusiasm, he waved his arm to exclaim, "A beautiful field, sir; a very fine field of operation" (Out of Harness, Thomas Guthrie, p 130).

 

We may think that these scenes from 170 years ago have little relevance to us today.  But how would we respond to such a scene?  Would we be heartbroken and stirred to action like Chalmers and Guthrie?  Are some of the housing schemes of Scotland any less chaotic and dysfunctional than the 19th century Cowgate? 

 

When Guthrie came to Edinburgh he came to a city gripped with industrial and social upheaval.  Overcrowding, poverty, alcoholism and abuse were rife.  The main reason for ragged schools was because children were being thrown out on the streets by drunken parents to beg and steal.  In his Autobiography he estimates that less than 5 in 150 attended church.  But he didn't despair.  He developed a Biblical vision for his parish and especially for the poor.  He visited systematically, he worked tirelessly, served sacrificially and loved indiscriminately. 

Most importantly Chalmers and Guthrie had a strategy and structure to win a geographical area for Christ.  As Guthrie said of Chalmers and his 'parochial system'; to change the face of a district required, in his opinion, a more extensive and efficient system of cultivation - a school for children; a church with its door open to the poorest of the inhabitants; and a large staff of zealous men and women - each with their own section of families to visit, and all working in harmony, like bees in a hive, under the direction of the minister, their captain, bishop or superintendent (Out of Harness, Thomas Guthrie, p 128).  Surely this is what we need again.  We need a team around our ministers who can reach out to a local area caring for body and soul.  The great issues of our age are family breakdown, debt, isolation, addiction and poverty.  As Guthrie argues time and again, the gospel is the answer but this does not abdicate the church from responding with practical expressions of love in seeking to reach out to the broken and marginalised in our society. 

But what about schools?  The church needs to reassert its influence in education after decades of secular humanism pushing religious instruction to the margins. The Free Church in particular has a proud history of building schools and lifting thousands out of ignorance.  It is interesting to note that the great priority of the Free Church in 1843 was for schools and mission (by 1844-45 £50,000 had been raised for the School Building Fund). It was not until 1845 that the Manse Fund was established and Guthrie took on his role as the 'great beggar man' as he was called by Rev Wallace Duncan of Peebles. 

Guthrie (in many ways prophetically) said in his evidence to the parliamentary committee of 1853 'I do not wish the government to supersede our efforts; what I wish the State to do is, to supplement them' (Memoirs, p 468).  He was, of course, referring to his beloved Ragged Schools, but the point was well made.  The state has long since superseded the efforts of those with a personal or charitable interest in education and the 'one size fits all' state system struggles to respond to the complex (and often tragic) issues facing many children today. Children from poorer backgrounds in particular are suffering in schools where poverty and generational family breakdown are rife. Many churches are providing breakfast clubs where kids often testify that it is their only meal of the day.  The schools do their best but so much more is needed.  Could this be the time for a re-look at Ragged Schools? This Guthrie fan certainly thinks so.  In the meantime we have 'a very fine field of operation' across Scotland.  The challenges are huge but let's recapture the spirit of Chalmers as we seek to tackle them. 

 

 

 

 
 

 

 

Streets Paved with Gold - the London City Mission, Ragged Schools and Rice Christians

Once again I have to thank Rev Dr John Nicholls, Chief Executive of the London City Mission for sending me further material on Ragged Schools in London.  Below are a few quotes from chapter 4 of John's book co-authored with Irene Howat called Streets Paved with Gold, Christian Focus Publications, 2003.  If you want to read the entire chapter it can be downloaded from here and is used with kind permission from Christian Focus Publications. 

Within the chapter on Ragged Schools by Nicholls and Howat there is a good summary of a what a Ragged School was;

'An Edinburgh man, when asked to describe a Ragged School, said they were Sunday schools set up in the poorest parts where every house was ‘worn-out and crazy’ and nearly every tenant a beggar, or worse. ‘These schools, he said, were for ragged, diseased and crime-worn children, such as would not be admitted to any other kind of school.’ The one he instanced was in Field Lane, Smithfield, where 45 young people had to overcome the objections of their parents in order to attend; the parents viewing any possible reformation in their offspring as a potential loss of criminal earnings. Some of the children, who were aged six to 18, had already been in prison, and that, the Scot concluded, would be where they would spend much of the rest of their lives unless educated at the Ragged School. The teacher at Field Lane School was a big-hearted woman who did the work voluntarily three days a week' (Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, 7th June, 1845).

I've already written here about the Ragged School Movement in London, the 'Devils Acre' and the involvement of Charles Dickens.  My family and I were down in London in October this year and visited Covent Garden for the first time.  It is an extremely nice part of London and it is hard to imagine the Dickensian situation described in Streets Paved with Gold ;

'As the men of the young London City Mission tramped the streets and alleyways of their districts, they met the conditions described by Dickens. ‘Covent-garden Market, when it was market morning, was wonderful company. The great wagons of cabbages, with growers’ men and boys lying asleep under them, and with sharp dogs from market-garden neighbourhoods looking after the whole, were as good as a party. But one of the worst sights I know in London, is to be found in the children who prowl about this place; who sleep in the baskets, fight for the offal, dart at any object they think they can lay their thieving hands on, dive under the carts and barrows,dodge the constables, and are perpetually making a blunt pattering on the pavement of the Piazza with the rain of their naked feet. A painful and unnatural result comes of the comparison one is forced to institute between the growth of corruption as displayed in the so much improved and cared for fruits of the earth, and the growth of corruption as displayed in these all uncared for (except inasmuch as ever-hunted) savages’ (Oliver Twist).

It is interesting to see the size and scale of the Ragged School Movement by 1876 and also to notice Lord Shaftesbury's multi faceted campaigning which included reform of abusive working practices;

'By 1861, 176 schools were connected to the Ragged School Union, which for the previous 17 years had worked ‘to give permanence, regularity and vigour to the existing Ragged Schools and to promote the formation of new ones’. Shaftesbury was chairman of the Union. Baptist Noel and R.C.L. Bevan, both closely connected with the London City Mission, were on the committee. So it was not only individual missionaries who were concerned to help the least privileged of the city’s children, the Mission’s leaders were also working to the same end. Mid-19th century evangelicals had a social conscience that led them to hands-on action; they also had a loud voice that got things done in government. While Shaftesbury was lending his name and support to the Ragged School Union, and visiting individual schools in the poorest parts of London, he was at the same time campaigning for there to be a limit to the number of hours children were allowed to work in factories and coalmines.' 

Perhaps one of the most interesting points raised in Streets Paved with Gold is the fear of creating 'rice Christians'.  This continues to be an issue today with many Christian organisations being accused of manipulation when offering food/clothes/help on condition of salvation.  I am often asked at meetings 'when do you get the gospel in?'  My response is usually to say that there was there was no sermon on the Jericho Road and the Cross itself was an act of love rather than a sermon.  When people walk in to a Night Shelter run by a Christian organisation or a church, cold, hungry and wet, the greatest act of love is to feed them, and give them somewhere warm to sleep. Perhaps the greatest example of this is Les Miserables where Jean Valjean is on the receiving end of great kindness and grace from a Bishop. Famously he says to Valjean 'Do not forget, never forget that you have promised to use this money in becoming an honest man. Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good.' This grace led to spiritual transformation without the need for a sermon. Preaching of course has a central place in the salvation of sinners but we need to remember that it is the Holy Spirit that regenerates and any church or organisation that seeks to bribe or manipulate people in a vulnerable position will only do huge damage to the kingdom of God.  Love, if it is true love must come with no strings attached.  In order to avoid the allegation of 'rice Christians' LCM pursued a policy of dividing evangelism and practical relief although it seems to have been fairly loosely interpreted;

'The LCM’s official policy had always been that the spreading of the gospel was paramount, and missionaries were forbidden to be involved financially with their people. As more and more missionaries became involved in the setting up and running of Ragged Schools, the Mission clarified this policy further. ‘The missionaries are most carefully to avoid the giving of temporal relief, as not their department of Christian effort, and as most materially interfering with the integrity of their especial work.  The missionaries are strictly forbidden from writing letters soliciting aid for persons in distress, or for objects connected with the district except with the special leave of one of the Secretaries … The missionaries must not make themselves responsible, or incur pecuniary responsibility in any form, for ... expenses attendant of Ragged Schools, rooms of meeting ...’ Behind these regulations lay not a lack of concern for the poor but the fear that, once missionaries were seen as a source of ready cash, it would be difficult for them to be sure of the honesty of those professing spiritual concern and conversion. The Mission was concerned to avoid the problem of what later became known as ‘rice Christians’. Yet the regulations were always interpreted fairly broadly, as in the case of a missionary who persuaded his local butcher and cookshops to help him feed starving children.'

There is also an interesting story about an LCM Missionary who is jumped on the way back from  a meeting.  It gives an insight in to the dangers missionaries placed themselves in on a daily basis;

'The Mission would probably not have been for the nervous or fearful either, as illustrated by one missionary’s experience of a visit to a Ragged School. The ‘little incident’ was reported in the February 1863 Magazine under the heading ‘A Missionary Garroted’. ‘We fill up the remaining lines of this number with a narrative of a little incident which has just occurred to a missionary … Having received an invitation to attend a Ragged School Meeting in his old district (Deptford), he was induced to accept the invitation and pay a visit to his former friends. His return home from this visit was necessarily somewhat late, and in passing though Southwark near St. Saviour’s Church, he was accosted by two men, one of whom pinioned his arms and the other grasped his throat in his embrace. From the effects of the violence he is not yet free. He was robbed by them of his watch and the money which he happened to have in his pockets.’  Interestingly, his watch was returned to him by one of the thieves, but the other had no compunction about keeping a missionary’s money!' 

The chapter concludes with the legacy of the London City Mission and the ongoing work of the Shaftesbury Society the successor of the Ragged School Union;

'London City Missionaries have on many occasions been the agents of change, and this was certainly true in the establishment of Ragged Schools. From them, or associated with them, were the Ragged School and Chapel Union (again, with Lord Shaftesbury as its President), the Children’s Country Holiday Fund, Pearson’s Fresh Air Fund and, more loosely, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.  Thirty years after the first missionaries began Ragged Schools, their work came to an end. With the Education Act of 1870, elementary education was made available for all children, regardless of means. But while children’s educational needs were then catered for, their most basic welfare needs were not. The Ragged School Union became the Shaftesbury Society and continued to work for the good of the  children. Nor did the London City Mission opt out of education. Missionaries today are still involved in school work, after-school groups and children’s clubs. They still have a concern for the whole life of each child.'

I would like to recommend Streets Paved with Gold.  Remember you can read the whole of chapter 4 here.  It is an excellent read and the London City Mission continue to do a wonderful work which deserve our support and prayers.

Charles Dickens and The Devils Acre

My good friend Rev Dr John Nicholls, Chief Executive of the London City Mission recently sent me an interesting link to a website entitled 'Cholera and the Thames'.  Within the website and under the section on 'Cholera in Westminster' there is a section entitled 'The Devils Acre'.  I find it slightly amusing that the heart of political power in the 1840's was once an area of '...thieves...and charlatans' (no change there then).  All quotes below are from the website unless otherwise stated.

The Devils Acre was 'located in what is currently the prestigious heart of Westminster. Yet at the time of the cholera outbreak, the Devil’s Acre was little more than a dismal swamp, home to a community of beggars, thieves, prostitutes, and charlatans. It was said that it was the area most ideal for housing criminals of all types as the police only made rare visits to the area—and when they did the local inhabitants vigorously repelled them. Charles Dickens’s campaigning magazine ‘Household Words’ featured the area in its very first edition in 1850 and helped to popularise the infamous name that had been given to an area that lay between the pillars of state; Westminster Abbey (Church), Buckingham Palace (Crown) and the Houses of Parliament (State). The streets that encompassed The Devil's Acre were Old Pye Street, Great St Anne's Lane (now St Ann Street and the location of Westminster Archives) and Duck Lane (now St Matthew Street) in the parish of Westminster St Margaret and St John.'

Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens would have been very familiar with the area as a young parliamentary reporter and summarised it as follows; 'There is no part of the metropolis which presents a more chequered aspect, both physical and moral, than Westminster. The most lordly streets are frequently but a mask for the squalid districts which lie behind them, whilst spots consecrated to the most hallowed of purposes are begirt by scenes of indescribably infamy and pollution; the blackest tide of moral turpitude that flows in the capital rolls its filthy wavelets up to the very walls of Westminster Abbey.’

The website confirms the incredible effect of the Ragged School Movement which was taken up by Charles Dickens and others such as Anthony Ashley-Cooper (7th Earl of Shaftesbury), Angela Burdett-Coutts and of course in Scotland Thomas Guthrie.  The famous 'One Tun Pub' in Old Pyre Street, London was a training centre for young street kids who were made in to career criminals.  Dickens was inspired after visiting a Ragged School to write his second novel 'Oliver Twist' or 'The Parish Boys Progress' (an allusion to John Bunyan's Pilgrims Progress).  The story of the One Tun Pub parallels the story of Oliver Twist very closely except that the One Tun was converted into a Ragged School and many were helped to choose a different direction in life.

Early attempts to respond to the huge needs of the Devils Acre came from the London City Mission which was begun in 1835 by a Scot named David Nasmith;  'The plight of children in the area, many of them street orphans, also shocked those who went into the area to try and help. The City of London Mission felt that the area was so depraved that it had to be re-conquered for Christianity. For the last half of the 19th century its missionaries compiled reports on the area based on door to door visits in the neighbourhood. One report by missionary Andrew Walker described the extent of the depravity. He was shocked to discover that street orphans were taken off of the streets into ‘the School of Fobology’ which was based in the One Tun pub in Old Pye Street. The ‘Fagin like’ master of the school gave them a master class in the art of pick pocketing. This shocked one wealthy philanthropist Adeline Cooper into buying the pub and converting it into a ‘Ragged school’ with the help of the famous social reformer Lord Shaftesbury. Angela Burdett-Coutts was also a prime mover in the ‘Ragged School’ movement, which sought to provide basic education for poor children. Her involvement in education in the area was long term and eventually she helped to build a school for local children, that still bares her name in Rochester Street, SW1.'



7th Earl of Shaftesbury

Dickens was going to write a pamphlet on the work of Ragged Schools but instead went on to write 'A Christmas Carol.'  Through this and his magazine 'Household Words' Dickens went on to support the work of the Ragged School movement.  Below is a (very lengthy) letter from Charles Dickens to The Daily News in February 1846 after visiting the Field Lane Ragged School.  Towards the end of the letter Dickens seems to suggest some slight reservations about the schools by saying; 'So far as I have any means of judging of what is taught there, I should individually object to it, as not being sufficiently secular, and as presenting too many religious mysteries and difficulties, to minds not sufficiently prepared for their reception.'  Despite these reservations about the Christian nature of the education, Dickens goes on to heartily recommend the project and appeals to Christian philanthropists to commit money to the building of future Ragged Schools.  Below I have pasted most of the letter but the full version can be found here;

'This attempt is being made in certain of the most obscure and squalid parts of the Metropolis, where rooms are opened, at night, for the gratuitous instruction of all comers, children or adults, under the title of RAGGED SCHOOLS. The name implies the purpose. They who are too ragged, wretched, filthy, and forlorn, to enter any other place: who could gain admission into no charity school, and who would be driven from any church door; are invited to come in here, and find some people not depraved, willing to teach them something, and show them some sympathy, and stretch a hand out, which is not the iron hand of Law, for their correction.'

The letter continues;

'For the instruction, and as a first step in the reformation, of such unhappy beings, the Ragged Schools were founded. I was first attracted to the subject, and indeed was first made conscious of their existence, about two years ago, or more, by seeing an advertisement in the papers dated from West Street, Saffron Hill, stating "That a room had been opened and supported in that wretched neighbourhood for upwards of twelve months, where religious instruction had been imparted to the poor", and explaining in a few words what was meant by Ragged Schools as a generic term, including, then, four or five similar places of instruction. I wrote to the masters of this particular school to make some further inquiries, and went myself soon afterwards.

It was a hot summer night; and the air of Field Lane and Saffron Hill was not improved by such weather, nor were the people in those streets very sober or honest company. Being unacquainted with the exact locality of the school, I was fain to make some inquiries about it. These were very jocosely received in general; but everybody knew where it was, and gave the right direction to it. The prevailing idea among the loungers (the greater part of them the very sweepings of the streets and station houses) seemed to be, that the teachers were quixotic, and the school upon the whole "a lark". But there was certainly a kind of rough respect for the intention, and (as I have said) nobody denied the school or its whereabouts, or refused assistance in directing to it.

It consisted at that time of either two or three--I forget which-miserable rooms, upstairs in a miserable house. In the best of these, the pupils in the female school were being taught to read and write; and though there were among the number, many wretched creatures steeped in degradation to the lips, they were tolerably quiet, and listened with apparent earnestness and patience to their instructors. The appearance of this room was sad and melancholy, of course--how could it be otherwise!--but, on the whole, encouraging.

The close, low chamber at the back, in which the boys were crowded, was so foul and stifling as to be, at first, almost insupportable. But its moral aspect was so far worse than its physical, that this was soon forgotten. Huddled together on a bench about the room, and shown out by some flaring candles stuck against the walls, were a crowd of boys, varying from mere infants to young men; sellers of fruit, herbs, lucifer-matches, flints; sleepers under the dry arches of bridges; young thieves and beggars--with nothing natural to youth about them: with nothing frank, ingenuous, or pleasant in their faces; low-browed, vicious, cunning, wicked; abandoned of all help but this; speeding downward to destruction; and UNUTTERABLY IGNORANT.

This, Reader, was one room as full as it could hold; but these were only grains in sample of a Multitude that are perpetually sifting through these schools; in sample of a Multitude who had within them once, and perhaps have now, the elements of men as good as you or I, and maybe infinitely better; in sample of a Multitude among whose doomed and sinful ranks (oh, think of this, and think of them!) the child of any man upon this earth, however lofty his degree, must, as by Destiny and Fate, be found, if, at its birth, it were consigned to such an infancy and nurture, as these fallen creatures had!

This was the Class I saw at the Ragged School. They could not be trusted with books; they could only be instructed orally; they were difficult of reduction to anything like attention, obedience, or decent behaviour; their benighted ignorance in reference to the Deity, or to any social duty (how could they guess at any social duty, being so discarded by all social teachers but the gaoler and the hangman!) was terrible to see. Yet, even here, and among these, something had been done already. The Ragged School was of recent date and very poor; but he had inculcated some association with the name of the Almighty, which was not an oath, and had taught them to look forward in a hymn (they sang it) to another life, which would correct the miseries and woes of this.

The new exposition I found in this Ragged School, of the frightful neglect by the State of those whom it punishes so constantly, and whom it might, as easily and less expensively, instruct and save; together with the sight I had seen there, in the heart of London; haunted me, and finally impelled me to an endeavour to bring these Institutions under the notice of the Government; with some faint hope that the vastness of the question would supersede the Theology of the schools, and that the Bench of Bishops might adjust the latter question, after some small grant had been conceded. I made the attempt; and have heard no more of the subject from that hour.

The perusal of an advertisement in yesterday's paper, announcing a lecture on the Ragged Schools last night, has led me into these remarks. I might easily have given them another form; but I address this letter to you, in the hope that some few readers in whom I have awakened an interest, as a writer of fiction, may be, by that means, attracted to the subject, who might otherwise, unintentionally, pass it over.

I have no desire to praise the system pursued in the Ragged Schools; which is necessarily very imperfect, if indeed there be one. So far as I have any means of judging of what is taught there, I should individually object to it, as not being sufficiently secular, and as presenting too many religious mysteries and difficulties, to minds not sufficiently prepared for their reception. But I should very imperfectly discharge in myself the duty I wish to urge and impress on others, if I allowed any such doubt of mine to interfere with my appreciation of the efforts of these teachers, or my true wish to promote them by any slight means in my power. Irritating topics, of all kinds, are equally far removed from my purpose and intention. But, I adjure those excellent persons who aid, munificently, in the building of New Churches, to think of these Ragged Schools; to reflect whether some portion of their rich endowments might not be spared for such a purpose; to contemplate, calmly, the necessity of beginning at the beginning; to consider for themselves where the Christian Religion most needs and most suggests immediate help and illustration; and not to decide on any theory or hearsay, but to go themselves into the Prisons and the Ragged Schools, and form their own conclusions. They will be shocked, pained, and repelled, by much that they learn there; but nothing they can learn will be onethousandth part so shocking, painful, and repulsive, as the continuance for one year more of these things as they have been for too many years already.

Anticipating that some of the more prominent facts connected with the history of the Ragged Schools, may become known to the readers of The Daily News through your account of the lecture in question, I abstain (though in possession of some such information) from pursuing the question further, at this time. But if I should see occasion, I will take leave to return to it.'

First published February 4, 1846, The Daily News

If you look over to the section on 'Ragged Schools' within this blog you will see an interesting obitury to Andrew Walker, London City Missionary who is referred in the website.  Many thanks to John Nicholls and others in the London City Mission for sending me items from their archives. 

A Mission of Mercy

I had a very enjoyable day off from work today.  After dropping three boys off at school, and after a much needed porridge and coffee at Pret a Manger (a great company who give a lots of money and food to homeless charities), I made my way to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Queen Street.  To my shame I can't ever remember visiting before although I'm sure I must have been taken at some point in my childhood.  

After a recent discussion with the fount of all things Free Church, Mr Bill Anderson, I went to look at the two current paintings of Dr Thomas Guthrie hanging in the gallery and ask to look at others in their archives.  The first painting on display was originally entitled 'Dr Guthrie on a Mission of Mercy'.  It is of Guthrie standing at the top of the Lawnmarket with St Giles clearly in the background.  Having just re-read Guthrie's 'Seed Time and Harvest - A Plea for Ragged Schools' the painting doesn't quite capture the harrowing scenes of emaciated children that Guthrie describes.  It does, however capture Guthrie's tenderness for the thousands of 'ragged children' who were victims of the extreme poverty, lack of access to education and general abuse by addicted or absent parents.  Guthrie conservatively estimated the figure of ragged children in Edinburgh to be around 1000 in the mid 1840's although the figure could well have been twice that.

I can't say much about the painter other than what I have picked up on line.  It was a James Edgar (1819 - 1876) who also has a painting of Robert Burns in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.  The inscription below the painting gives a very brief overview of Guthrie's life.

The other painting of Guthrie currently hanging in the gallery is a much more domestic scene with Guthrie out fly fishing with his children Patrick and Anne on Lochlee.  

The inscription reads; 'The influential churchman and social reformer Thomas Guthrie was born in Brechin in Angus. He helped found the Free Church of Scotland in 1843. Guthrie was also an outspoken supporter of education for all and a passionate opponent of alcohol abuse. Guthrie took up fishing in order to spend time outdoors. Whilst at his Highland retreat at Lochlee, he practised trout fishing and was often found on the loch: 'We are all fishing daft here. My brother Patrick says that between us all together he cannot get a word of rational conversation; nothing but "trouts, baits, hooks, bobs, drags, flies, dressings, hackle and tackle.”' This oil sketch depicts a father at leisure with his children but also alludes to Guthrie’s profession as a 'fisher of men'.'  The painter was Sir George Harvey (1806 - 1876); 'Harvey is best known for his Scottish history painting and contemporary narrative scenes. Many of his subjects, designed to invite an emotional response, appear rather sentimental to modern viewers but were extremely popular when first exhibited.'

There are around 60 other photos or prints of Guthrie in the archives including one of his Kirk Session in Free St John's which I hope to go back and see. 

After a very enjoyable morning I spent some time in the Chalmers Hall of the Free Church College trying to track down the book 'Out of Harness' which Guthrie wrote about various periods of his life.  Prof John Macintosh gave me some help with other Thomas Guthrie sources I hope to look at  over the next few months including Session Minutes from Arbirlot, Old Greyfriars, St John's and Free St John's at the National Archives.  

It was a quick sprint back to Tollcross for a very entertaining Gaelic Pantomime by some very talented actors from Inverness.  A busy but enjoyable day!!

A Friend of the Poor and the Oppressed

Introduction

Dr Thomas Guthrie’s statue in Princes Street Gardens in Edinburgh epitomises what many of us involved in Christian social action are seeking to achieve; with a Bible in one hand and his other hand resting protectively on a ‘ragged child’ Guthrie’s life combined the two great priorities of the church; truth and love.  Despite his great achievements, Guthrie is almost unknown today either as a preacher or social reformer.  While there were a number of wonderful books of sermons published in his lifetime none are readily available today except through ‘print to order’.  The lack of knowledge about Guthrie is surely a tragedy and the study of Guthrie’s life and ministry reaps a rich reward for anyone who takes the time and energy to find out more about this great man. 

Early Life and University

Born in July 1803 in the town of Brechin to the son of a local merchant and banker, Thomas Guthrie went on to study at Edinburgh University at the tender age of 12.  As he himself comments in his autobiography ‘beyond the departments of fun and fighting I was in no way distinguished at college’ (Autobiography and Memoir, 1896, p 40).  After 4 years of philosophy and literature and then a further 4 of theology, Guthrie undertook a further 2 years studying chemistry, anatomy and natural history.  It was during this time that Guthrie attended the lectures of the famous Dr Knox connected to the Burke and Hare murders. 

Hope Postponed

Despite clear ability, Guthrie had to wait 5 years for a charge.  These years were not wasted with Guthrie enrolling in the Sorbonne in France to study during the winter of 1826/7.  He certainly saw another side to life in Paris and sums it up by saying ‘Paris is the best place in the world for pursuing any science, saving those of morality and religion’ (Autobiography and Memoirs, 1896, p 243).  Returning to Brechin in March 1828 Guthrie worked in his father’s bank (The Dundee Union Banking Company) for several years before finally being called to Arbirlot, Angus in 1830.  The Manager of the banks head office in Dundee said to Guthrie on one occasion; ‘if you only preach, sir, as well as you have banked, you will be sure to succeed’ (Autobiography and Memoirs, 1896, p 258).  During this time he became an accomplished platform speaker and as well as regular preaching, became involved in the Apocrypha controversy which was particularly fierce in Brechin.

Spending nearly 10 years at university and then a further 5 without a church prepared Guthrie in a unique way for the challenges ahead.  His sons comment in their Memoir of their father ‘these five years of hope deferred, however, afforded Mr Guthrie a profitable though peculiar training for the eminent place he was afterwards to fill.  His scientific studies in Edinburgh, his residence abroad, his experience of banking in his father’s banking-house, the leisure he enjoyed for enlarging his stores of general information, had all their influence in making him the many sided man he became’ (Autobiography and Memoir, 1896, p 225).

Evangelist and Preacher

Guthrie was no ivory tower theologian and his common touch made him unconventional (but very successful) in both his approach to social reform and his evangelism.  He says in his autobiography; ‘If ministers were less shut up in their own shells, and had more common sense and knowledge of the world, they would cling less tenaciously to old forms, suitable enough to bygone but not to the present times’ (Autobiography and Memoir, 1896, p 89).  He went on to prove this in his first charge in Arbirlot (1830-37) by abolishing two Sunday services.  They were replaced by a longer service at noon and an evening Bible Class for young people aged 15-25.  At the ‘Minister’s Class’ Guthrie would work through the Westminster Shorter Catechism, give a shorter, simplified version of the earlier sermon (‘abundantly illustrated by examples and anecdotes’) and test the knowledge of his students.  As Guthrie says in his autobiography; ‘None of the services and ecclesiastical machinery at work did so much good, perhaps, as this class’ (Autobiography and Memoir, 1896, p 127).

Guthrie’s reputation grew rapidly and after 7 years in Angus he was called to Old Greyfriars in Edinburgh and was inducted in September 1837 as assistant to Rev Sym.  Guthrie preached to huge congregations of the middle and upper classes in his new congregation but many of the poor were kept out due to pew rents.  An afternoon service in the Magdalen Chapel was where Guthrie connected with the poor and marginalised in the infamous Cowgate district of Edinburgh.  His great desire was to communicate the redeeming power of the gospel to those who were often shut out of the Scottish Church in 19^th century Scotland.  When he eventually planted the new church of St John’s in 1840 he reserved 650 seats for the people of his parish regardless of their ability to pay pew rents. 

Guthrie combined solid reformed theology with a simple, accessible (if somewhat flowery) style.  He says ‘…I used the simplest, plainest terms, avoiding anything vulgar, but always, where possible, employing the Saxon tongue – the mother tongue of my hearers.  I studied the style of the addresses which the ancient and inspired prophets delivered to the people of Israel, and saw how, differing from the dry disquisitions or a naked statement of truths, they abounded in metaphors, figures and illustrations.  I turned to the gospels, and found that He who knew what was in man, what could best illuminate a subject, win the attention, and move the heart, used parables and illustrations, stories, comparisons, drawn from the scenes of nature and familiar life…’ (Autobiography and Memoir, 1896, p 130).  Like Thomas Chalmers Guthrie followed the parochial or territorial system of church planting.  This is defined by his sons in their Memoir of their father as; the church at the door of the poor, the church free to all, a properly equipped school in every parish and elders, deacons and district visitors used to make regular contact with parishioners.  As soon as Guthrie planted St John’s he outlined his vision for 30 elders and 15 deacons to actively pastor a relatively small area of central Edinburgh.  His evangelism was relational, low key but always with a long term vision for the transformation of the local community.

Social Reformer

While Dr Guthrie was one of the finest preachers of the Free Church in the 19^th Century, his greatest legacy was surely as a social reformer.  This is summed up on his statue in Edinburgh which declares he was ‘a friend of the poor and the oppressed’.  This started in his first parish in Angus.  Guthrie established a savings bank and library; ‘The success of the bank and the library I attribute very much to this, that I myself managed them.  They were of great service by bringing me into familiar and frequent and kindly contact with my people’ (Autobiography and Memoir, 1896, p 113).  Guthrie believed that the minister should live and work amongst the people.  Writing while still in Arbirlot he said to a Mr Dunlop; ‘I have discovered from my own experience that the further the people are removed from the manse, the less influence has the minister over them: and if a man won’t live among the scum of the Cowgate I would at once say to him ‘You can’t be my minister’ (Autobiography and Memoir, 1896, p 309). 

When Guthrie arrived in Edinburgh in 1837 it was growing rapidly with the industrial revolution.   With large scale immigration from Ireland and large scale movement within Scotland from the country to the cities, Guthrie found extreme overcrowding combined with the most heart rending poverty within central Edinburgh.  Drunkenness was a widespread problem with many children being forced out to beg, borrow and steal to feed their parents habit.  There is a famous story told in Guthrie’s book ‘Out of Harness’ that describes how Guthrie stood on George IV Bridge just after he arrived in Edinburgh.  Looking down on his new parish known as the Cowgate he describes ‘a living stream of humanity in motion beneath his feet’.  A hand was laid on his shoulder and he turned around to find the famous preacher and reformer Dr Thomas Chalmers.  Standing in silence for a few moments Chalmers eventually exclaimed ‘a beautiful field sir; a very fine field of operation!’ (Out of Harness, p 126).  This was the field that Guthrie was to labour in for the rest of his active ministry.

Ragged Schools

Guthrie was appalled by what he saw around him on the streets of Edinburgh when he arrived in 1837.   Writing in 1872 Guthrie says; ‘Five-and-thirty years ago, on first coming to this city, I had not spent a month in my daily walks in our Cowgate and Grassmarket without seeing that, with worthless, drunken and abandoned parents for their only guardians, there were thousands of poor innocent children, whose only chance of being saved from a life of ignorance and crime lay in a system of compulsory education’ (Autobiography and Memoir, 1896, p 438).  Inspired by a cobbler from Portsmouth called John Pounds who saved 500 ‘ragged children’ from a life of neglect and delinquency, Guthrie became the Scottish ‘Apostle’ of the Ragged School movement.  There was already an Industrial Feeding School in Aberdeen pioneered by a Sherriff Watson in 1841 but the key difference was that Guthrie’s Ragged Schools were always attended by choice rather than coercion or as an alternative to custody.  Inspired by the Aberdeen school, and a similar school in Dundee established in 1842, Guthrie began to gather those of like mind to rescue thousands of children who, as he says of one poor boy were; ‘launched on a sea of human passions and exposed to a thousand temptations…left by society, more criminal than he, to become a criminal, and then punished for his fate, not his fault’ (Autobiography and Memoir, 1896, p 440).

The ‘Ragged School Movement’ was galvanised by the publication of Guthrie’s now famous book ‘Seedtime and Harvest of Ragged Schools’ which was revised and republished three times.  His great skills as a communicator were put to excellent use in this book and Guthrie powerfully put forward the compelling social, economic and spiritual arguments for Ragged Schools.  Guthrie rises to his greatest heights of language in lambasting the money wasted in prisons and the inaction of the general (and particularly the Christian) public; ‘God forbid that I should judge any! Only I cannot comprehend the humanity of the man who stands on a stormy beach with a wreck before him, drowning wretches hanging in its shrouds, their pitiful cries wafted to his ears their imploring hands stretched out to the shore, and who does not regard this dreadful scene otherwise with cold indifference’ (Seed Time and Harvest of Ragged Schools, 1860, p 161).  Guthrie argues that the schools harmonised the views of two of Scotland’s preeminent philanthropists; ‘Our scheme furnishes a common walk for both.  They meet in our school room.  Dr Alison [William Alison, Professor of Medicine at Edinburgh, who advocated social and economic measures to alleviate poverty] comes in with his bread – Dr Chalmers with his Bible: here is food for the body – there for the soul’ (Quoted in Autobiography and Memoir, 1896, p 457).   

The Ragged Schools were ingenious in that they didn’t take the children out of their homes but gave them a solid education and structure during the day.  The children attended for 12 hours during the winter and 11 hours during the summer.  The school day started at 8am with ‘ablutions’ followed by work, breakfast and play, calling roll and Bible lesson, work, walking, dinner, education, work or education, work and supper.  Interestingly there was a good balance between work, play and education and Guthrie often stresses how the children needed to be broken with Christian kindness rather than the lash of corporal punishment; ‘punishments are rare.  We work by love and kindness; and, though on entering our school they are as foul as the gutter out of which they had been plucked, unbroken as the wild Arab or wild ass of the desert, ignorant of everything that is good, with rags on their backs and misery in their looks, such change comes over them that better-behaved scholars, sharper intellects, happier faces you will see nowhere (Seed Time of Ragged Schools, 1860, p 165).  The results of the ragged schools were remarkable.  The Edinburgh prison population in 1847 (the first year of the Ragged Schools in Edinburgh) consisted of 315 under 14’s (5% of the prison population).  By 1851 the figure was 56 out of 5,869 (1%) (Autobiography and Memoir, 1896, p 459).  Guthrie and his fellow philanthropists had proved that prevention was indeed better than cure.

Conclusion

Guthrie was an outstanding preacher, a faithful pastor, a winsome evangelist and one of Scotland’s finest social reformers.  Guthrie’s legacy lives on in the provision that there is both in terms of welfare and education for rich and poor alike.  While Guthrie would be saddened at the secularisation there has been in the public school system, he would surely be pleased to see education being offered to every child free of charge.  Few would deny that Guthrie and others like Thomas Chalmers, James Begg and Dr William Alison paved the way for the modern welfare system

Rev Tomas Guthrie died in the early hours of Monday 24^th February 1873 with his faithful Highland nurse and his family at his bedside.  It is said that with the exception of Dr Thomas Chalmers and Sir James Simpson, Edinburgh had not seen a funeral like it in a generation.  It was reported that 230 children from the original ragged school attended his funeral and sang a hymn at the grave. One little girl was overheard saying ‘He was all the father I ever knew.’  Amongst Guthrie’s last words he was overheard to say ‘a brand plucked from the burning!’  His legacy was that through his vision and love for his Saviour, the Ragged School movement was established which in turn plucked thousands of little brands from a life of poverty and crime, and brought them to know the ultimate friend of sinners.