Page:The leather-workers of Daryaganj.djvu/14

10 that while even a very weakly flame, a farthing dip—if I may be allowed an expression which has been already used in this connection—may shed around it a light faint indeed, and yet amidst the surrounding blackness of darkness by no means to be despised, on the other hand it runs—especially if exposed to a raging storm—a very considerable risk of being itself entirely quenched. And this is what it seemed to me was happening, and that our poor people, starting from but a very low tone of Christianity themselves, so far from being able to influence, were quite unable to resist the mass of heathenism in the midst of which they lived, and that till they were freed from this contact and brought by some means or other into a purer air, there was but little chance of their attaining any true manhood in Christ. This view was most fully borne out by the testimony of those among themselves in whom any real strivings after a higher truer life were beginning to make themselves felt: they always begged us to separate them off from their neighbours and give them a place to themselves, representing that till this was done they felt their utter impotence to make any head against the evil around them. Influenced then by these considerations we determined after much hesitation and deliberation to try the experiment of a modified form of segregation, not taking them away from their trade or out of the city into a wholly distinct village, but settling a few of the more earnestly-disposed amongst them in a little square of houses apart by themselves but at the same time in the midst of the dwellings of their old caste-fellows. Here they would be free to carry on their own trade under precisely the old conditions, and while they would be exempt from the actual intrusion into their midst of idolatry or any other abomination from which they honestly wished to escape, they would at the same time be so situated that their whole life and tone would be known, and if it did indeed rise to a higher standard, very speedily make itself felt on their neighbours. Several reasons seemed to point to Daryaganj, a district of the city, as the name imports on the river bank, as a suitable spot for this which we felt to be a most weighty experiment, involving as it did in great measure the abandonment of a theory to which we had hitherto held tenaciously. Accordingly a little square containing eight houses was built, and these were let to any Christians who professed that they wished to strive after a nearer approximation to the life to which their baptismal vow had pledged them, and were ready, in token thereof, to accept the following simple conditions which were indeed involved in the very idea of the place, viz.: