Page:Sermon by the Bishop of Rochester 1901.djvu/10

 causes who can be relied upon when there is good work to be done. It is a duty for us all according to our power to swell the volume—alas, all too small, of the forces which make for the bettering, and helping, and enlarging, of the life of their community—be it city, or village, or parish, or nation, or Church.

I am with you here to-day to thank you for the work of your College Mission in crowded Walworth—and to beg of you to go on doing for it what you have done—and more. I might easily tell you—I should like to tell you—what some of you have seen for yourselves, the greatness and the variety of the need for such work, the pathos of the lives of men, women, and children in dull and squalid streets—out of sight of all the things which give to our life its grace, and spaciousness, and charm; with the streets, dirty in every sense, for the playground of the children; with homes which can hardly be homes, so closely are they packed and jammed together several in a house; with constant anxiety about the work on which a livelihood depends, obtaining it perhaps when they have to walk an hour to it early and back from it late, and when it is obtained tied to such a round of unchanging grey lives and unattractive drudgery, and yet with such a variety of human interest, such a response to the touch of kindness and sympathy, such opportunities for what University men can do amongst them.

But this I cannot do now, and on that part of the matter I will only ask you to come and see for yourselves. That is worth reams of talk. You will certainly be interested. Very likely you would look back upon a day or two spent there as giving you more interest and more fresh knowledge of life than any other days in the year.

Will you consider it? But I believe that there is another way to lay hold of men's interest, which, with some at least, is more powerful, and goes deeper. I mean the way of looking to the principle of the matter.