Chalmers and Guthrie on the 'Charity of Kindness'

What is charity?  Is it just the widespread and indiscriminate distribution of money? How effective has this been over the last 50-60 years in our own country?  Is there a connection between poverty and morality?  Well as we saw in a previous article 'Dr Guthrie and the Blind Organist', Guthrie believed that the effect of the gospel which should create self denial, frugality (thriftiness, carefulness) and discipline could have a significant effect on a poor household.  Guthrie believed that there could be exceptions to this rule but generally speaking he held to the principle of Psalm 36 v 25: 'All my life I have not seen the righteous left forsaken, or begging for food.'  As he says: ‘I have made extensive enquiries; and feel perfect confidence in asserting that foresight and frugality would place our people, save in a few exceptional cases, beyond the reach of want or the need of charity.  It is the want of these that makes Poor Laws necessary – if they are necessary.’

Like all great social reformers Guthrie challenged sin as much as encouraging virtue.  He was like William Wilberforce who fought on the one hand against slavery but on the other fought for a reformation of manners.  We have a slightly idealised view of the Victorian era.  The reality was that as Eric Metaxas says in his biography of Wilberforce, Victorian society was particularly 'brutal, decadent, violent and vulgar.'  Like Wilberforce, Guthrie fought on various fronts to see a better society.  The simple provision of mercy was never enough for Guthrie, he sought a complete reformation of society at a moral and spiritual level.  It was a natural progression for Dr Guthrie to go on to become a fighter for temperance because he saw the huge damage that alcohol did among the working classes.  It was a development of his earlier views while still at Arbirlot (1830-37) where he established a savings bank.  As he says in his Memoirs: [this bank] ‘was a great success; training up the young to those habits of foresight, self-denial, and prudence, which are handmaids to virtue, and, though not religion, are nearly allied to it.’  Guthrie maintained that while we should fight the injustice of poverty at every turn, as he did, poverty can be compounded by addiction.

In his Second Plea for Ragged Schools Guthrie addresses himself to those who have, as yet, given nothing to the cause of Ragged Schools.  He quotes the verse in Proverbs 19 v 17: ‘He that lendeth to the poor, lendeth to the Lord, and he will repay.’  He then says: ‘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 payment 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, inprovidence, crimes, and detected impostures, against the claims of real poverty, they deserve not charity, by chastisement.’  He continues: ‘It is a scandal and a shame that such devouring locusts are permitted to infest our city, and swarm in its streets.  The vices of a system which the police strangely tolerate, and our charity unwisely maintains, are visible in the blotched and brazened features of those thriving solicitors.  The very breath with which they whine for charity smells of the dram shop.’   To me this is the problem we have today with a faceless and bureaucratic welfare system.  Far from helping many people it traps them in a cycle of poverty where they simply exist rather than being given the help they need to realise their full potential.  While is seems harsh to our 21st Century sensitivities to hear Guthrie saying that a particular group are 'not the poor', he would have been the first to help those addicted to alcohol if they genuinely sought help.  Far from writing them off, Guthrie was seeking to bring them to their senses by not indulging their addiction.

Rev Thomas Chalmers

It was Thomas Chalmers who proved with the revived 'Parochial' or 'Territorial' system that voluntary charity could almost always achieve greater results than state welfare.  This was because it was local, more personal, better tailored to people’s needs and more flexible to changes. When Thomas Chalmers was appointed to St John’s Parish, Glasgow in 1819 he agreed along with the Town Council that all new cases of destitution would be met out of the church funds.  Thomas Chalmers divided the Parish into 25 areas and appointed an elder and deacon to minister to both the spiritual and temporal needs of each area.  The instructions were few but clear:

‘When one applies for admittance through the deacon upon our funds, the first thing to be inquired into is, if there be any kind of work that he can yet do so as either to keep him altogether off, or as to make a partial allowance serve for his necessities; the second, what his relatives are willing to do for him; third whether he is a hearer in any dissenting place of worship, and whether its session will contribute to his relief.’  

Along with the introduction of Sunday Schools and widespread education it is little wonder that the rate of Poor Relief was drastically reduced in the Parish of St John’s. As Rev William Hannah says:

‘The drunken were told to give up their drunkenness, and that until they did so their case would not even be considered; the idle were told to set instantly to work, and if they complained that work could not be gotten, by kindly applications to employers, they were helped to obtain it; a vast number of primary applications melted into nothing under the pressure of a searching investigation.’  

After three years of this experiment, and despite St John’s accepting all the poor who had been on the sessional role of all three parishes that made up St John’s, the whole cost of ‘pauperism’ reduced from £1400 per year to £280.  As Chalmers says in his works: ‘our proposal was not met with an incredulity which was all but universal.’

Dr Guthrie and Rev Chalmers didn’t believe in ‘casual charity’ but in charity that offered hope and transformation.  This is why they both believed so passionately in the parochial or territorial system.  This is why Guthrie so passionately furthered the cause of Ragged Schools.  His aim was not just to relieve the suffering of ragged children but to offer them a new life.  

Psalm 41 commands us to ‘wisely consider the case of the poor’ not simply to franchise our responsibilities to the state.  Poverty is not just caused by a lack of money so our response can never be simplistic.  Poverty involves much more than financial poverty - it involves marginalisation, isolation, stigmatisation and being disenfranchised from others in society.  Chalmers and Guthrie show us that poverty relief must be personal, robust, bespoke, generous, enduring and always with an eye on long term transformation.  As Chalmers said in the General Assembly of 1822: ‘a safe and easy navigation has been ascertained from the charity of law to the charity of kindness; and, therefore, be it now reviled, or be it disregarded as it may, we have no doubt upon our spirits, whether we look to the depraving pauperism or to the burdened agriculture of our land, that the days are soon coming when men, looking for a way of escape from these sore evils, will be glad to our own enterprise, and be fain to follow it.’

Given the rampant poverty that we have today, might this be a moment when we look to experiments like St John's and perhaps think of a better way than the indiscriminate distribution of money? Benefits can be suspended almost on a whim and people are left utterly destitute.  Wouldn't a more personal, compassionate system, delivered in partnership with faith based, Third Sector Charities make for a better system?  Wouldn't it be better to be honest about the challenges people have (such as addiction) and offer them real help rather than ignoring it for years?  Shouldn't we provide the charity of kindness rather than the charity of law?

Amazing Grace - Book Review

Amazing Grace, William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

Eric Metaxas, 2008, Authentic Media

I love books and I particularly love biographies.  I find that when I read a biography history comes alive.  As Thomas Chalmers once said ‘all history is biography’.  History is woven in to the lives of people and their story give us a glimpse into history.

There can be few lives more remarkable than William Wilberforce and Eric Metaxas has done the world a great service in writing such an excellent biography of this great social reformer.  Wilberforce, I believe, is a man we should study closely at this juncture in our own history.  Why?  Well firstly because he lived at time of extreme social upheaval as we are experiencing.  As Metaxas says ‘Wilberforce can be pictured as a kind of hinge in the middle of history: he pulled the world around the corner, and we can’t even look back to see where we’ve come from.’  Secondly, Victorian society as Metaxas says: ‘was particularly brutal, decadent, violent, and vulgar.’  Slavery was just one of many shocking social ills including child prostitution and labour.  We are seeing a similar descent into coarseness and decadence in our own nation.  But lastly, and perhaps surprisingly for many Christians, much of the the Victorian church was a mere façade of true religion which in turn had a huge impact on its social conscience.  As Metaxas notes: ‘…the outward trappings of religion remained, but robust Christianity, with noble impulses, to care for the suffering and the less fortunate, was gone.’  A little bit like the United Kingdom over the last 60 years, Metaxas says of Victorian Christianity: ‘Religion would be defanged and declawed quietly, not killed in front of mobs.  If, before, the British faith had been like a great and noble lion, it would now become something more like a lapdog that never roared nor dared to bite, that could be fed bits of cheese and petted when one was in the mood to do so.’  So much of Christianity in Britain today is little more than a lapdog that is petted by people as and when they want.  This in turn has led to a retreat from our compassion for the poor and marginalised.

Amazing Grace is a well written account of Wilberforce’s journey from what we might call ‘historical faith’ or ‘nominal Christianity’ to a genuine experience of God.  In twenty-three chapters and three hundred pages Metaxas takes us through the huge ups and downs of Wilberforce’s remarkable life.  Were it not for a decision by young Williams mother, recently widowed and gravely ill, to send him to relatives, he may never have come into contact with true Christianity.  Sent from Hull to his aunt and uncles in Wimbledon at the tender age of eight, he came into contact with a form of Christianity that was very different from the ‘thin gruel and weak tea of High Anglicanism.’  His aunt and uncle were friends with George Whitfield who was used under God as the instrument of the Great Awakening that shook so much of the world out of its spiritual stupor.  More importantly, the young and impressionable Wilberforce met John Newton (‘the old African blasphemer’) who was to have a powerful effect on Wilberforce’s life.  Newton was a frequent visitor to Wimbledon for ‘parlour preaching’ as it was known, and Wilberforce was no stranger to Olney where he visited both Newton and spent many hours with the great hymn writer William Cowper.

Entering Parliament at the tender age of 21 in 1780, and as a friend of William Pitt, Wilberforce was set for a glittering political career.  It is remarkable to think that Wilberforce entered Parliament with such historical figures such as Edmund Burke, Lord North and Charles Fox.  It was a trip to the continent that God used to transform the rising political star.  During the winter of 1874 he took a trip with his former tutor Isaac Milner to France and Italy.  During the trip Wilberforce read The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul by Philip Doddridge.  It started a process in his life that led to a spiritual re-birth.  At that time many described the rise in Methodism as ‘madness’, but after Wilberforce’s family saw the change in his character his mother famously said ‘If this is madness, I hope he will bite us all.’ 

While Wilberforce tried to find his way with his new found faith, he considered withdrawing from public life.  At this time John Newton gave Wilberforce some famous advice: ‘It is hoped and believed that the Lord has raised you up for the good of his church and for the good of the nation.’  Pitt similarly advised in a letter to Wilberforce: ‘Surely the principles as well as the practice of Christianity are simple and lead not to meditation only, but to action.’  Around this time Wilberforce became convinced that he had been given a twofold mission from the Lord: ‘God almighty has set before me two great objects: the suppression of the Salve Trade and the reformation of manners.’  The rest of his life was given over to these great causes.

We owe a huge debt to Wilberforce.  He was used under God to abolish the iniquitous slave trade and civilise a nation that was in many ways barbaric and inhuman in the way it treated many out with the ruling elite.   As part of the Great Awakening and the rise of Methodism he awakened a corrupt church from its erroneous theology.  The Church of England at the time had huge investments in the West Indian Plantations but saw no contradiction between their theology and their actions.  As Metaxas says ‘It’s hard to avoid the harsh conclusion that the Church of England at the time was little more than a pseudo-Christian purveyor of government-sponsored, institutionalised hypocrisy.’  Worse than hypocrisy was the actual belief that the poor should be left in their God ordained position: ‘Many thought God had ordained the poor’s situation, that it was part of the natural order, and that they should therefore be kept where they were, in their misery.  To help them was tantamount to shaking one’s fist at God.’ Such perverse theology is perhaps never expressed today but is implicit in the lack of activity in some many churches.  Wilberforce’s energy for social reform at home and abroad was simply breath taking.  At one point Wilberforce was linked with 69 separate groups involved with social reform. 

The American artist and inventor Samuel Morse said that Wilberforce’s: ‘whole soul is bent on doing good to his fellow men.  Not a moment of his time is lost.  He is always planning some benevolent scheme, or other, and not only planning but executing…Oh, that men as Mr Wilberforce were more common in this world.’  We can learn a huge amount from Wilberforce and I can’t recommend this book highly enough.