Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/175

Rh first intention was to continue his relation with the university, and divide his work between Cambridge and Hitcham; but, finding that the duties of the latter place did not permit his absence, he took up his residence there in 1839. How different was the sphere of exertion upon which he had now entered will be apparent when we glance at the condition of the inhabitants of the parish when he first went among them.

The village of Hitcham consisted of one long, straggling street, and the parish contained rather more than a thousand persons, scattered over some 4,000 acres of land. The property of the parish was assessed at $30,000 a year, yet there was only a dame-school in the place. The unemployed and vagabond laborers were so numerous that the poor-rate in 1834 amounted to $5,000—equal, it was said, to over $6 for each man, woman, and child, in the village. The people were sunk to almost the lowest depths of moral and physical debasement. Ignorance, crime, and vice were rife, and the worst characters were addicted to poaching, sheep-stealing, drunkenness, and all kinds of immorality. The less vicious were more fond of idleness than work, and lolled about the road-sides, dead to all sense of moral shame, so long as they could live at the parish expense. Parish relief or charity was not unfrequently levied by bands of forty or fifty able-bodied laborers who had been in the habit of intimidating the previous rector into instant compliance with their demands. The houses of the poor were described as having been many of them little better than hovels, in which the common decencies of life could hardly be carried out. The church was almost empty on Sunday, and but little respect was paid to its ordinances. The previous rector had been satisfied with discharging his usual Sunday duties, and left the people to themselves during the week.

Such was the field which Prof. Henslow left Cambridge to cultivate. He went there as a missionary, to reclaim it from inveterate heathenism, which still passed under a Christian name. His difficulties were of the most formidable kind, and he had to grapple with them single-handed, for there were no influential persons in the parish either to coöperate in his work, or to encourage him in pursuing it. The parties with whom he had to deal were the farmers who rented the land from the landlords, and the laborers whom the farmers employed. The farmers are represented as having been intellectually raised but little above their laborers, as ignorant, obstinate, and prejudiced, and they doggedly opposed the new rector in all his schemes, and threw every possible obstacle in his way. But he was not a man to flinch from what he had undertaken, and, coolly estimating the difficulties of the situation, he set himself to work to reclaim his flock from their degradation, to industry, sobriety, independence, and self-respect. It was obvious enough that the inculcation of moral and religious lessons would have been utterly lost upon them—would have been like throwing pearls before swine—because men must be civilized before they