Page:Preaching the Gospel to the working classes impossible under the pew system.djvu/10

 meetings, "a crowd of well-dressed people;" go then into any of the neighbouring back streets and courts, and what do you there see? Crowds of ill-dressed people. Have not these as much right, yea, as great necessity, to worship God and hear His word as the well-dressed? Oh! one's heart burns with indignation at their exclusion from the means of salvation, "from the house of God and the gate of heaven," by the gigantic injustice of the pew system! What chance, what possibility, is there of "gaining the working classes" while this system continues? If they were roused, by any conceivable effort of house-to-house visitations, open-air preaching, by all that the most earnest men can accomplish or aspire to, what can be the result? Nothing but inevitable total failure! Desires may be excited, feelings may be stirred, impressions may be made, but—as the morning mist—they will pass away unless there is formed the habit of worshipping God and continually using the means of grace. In the Church alone can these be attained and enjoyed, and, unless we tell a lie to God every time we say "I believe in the Holy Catholic Church," in the Church are we bound to cherish these habits and provide these means for all whose salvation we profess to desire.

If an intelligent working man, brought up with all the religious disadvantages common to such, is persuaded to enter the Church which he has hitherto neglected, what does he meet with? and with what is he likely to be struck? Generally, he meets with what is enough to disgust and repel him for ever—with what is fitted to make him believe that the religion of minister and congregation is but a mockery both of God and man. He meets with no welcome where every heart should be open to receive him. He is a stranger in what is, in truth and right, his own home, his own Father's house! He sees some well-dressed "respectable" Christians sitting in their private seats, from which he is as much excluded as from their drawing-rooms; and he sees some ill-dressed and mostly crushed looking people sitting in pauper seats; and he hears the minister, who acquiesces in this state of things, saying "With God is no respect of Persons!" No wonder free seats are