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laws , the administration of justice , and the worship of God * The feelings which arise are those of admiration and complacency - the associations suggested are those of civilization , refinement , taste , order , intelligence , enjoyment , grandeur , and prosperity . Turn ? aside but a little , and you come into close-built streets , and yet narrower lanes and alleys , where the dismantled dwellings bear every mark of populous wretchedness . There are noisome smells , and loathsome sights , and disgusting sounds , from which the senses shrink . Here , too ,
we are aware that the outward appearance is aV true index of that which is within ; of a gradation whose highest point is the hard and ceaseless toil that humbles humanity into an automaton , with little more than the one sense of weariness and suffering , tworking for that which barely supplies sufficient strength to enable it to work on ; and the lowest point , a depravity whose depths the imagination cannot sound without pollution .
Here the human form and face are withered by the grasp of physical evil . Disease abides in these lurking-places , driven thither like a wild beast to its lair , and sustaining itself till the season when it may again stalk forth to terrify . The schoolmaster who is most abroad there , teaches lessons of which ignorance is bliss . The very children are initiated into the arts of fraud , theft , and violence . Horrid tales are told of premature
licentiousness . The Sabbath sun penetrates not through the mist of their miseries and abominations . To £ he higher orders of society they feel themselves slaves or enemies—perhaps both—and ever ripe and ready for vindictive hostilities . Intoxication , in its most maddening form , is the most coveted enjoyment . And in passing on , by haunts of wretchedness and dens of
vice , the emotions which rise are those of pity , apprehension , disgust , almost despair of man ; the associations , those of barbarism , brutality , anguish , confusion , and guilt . Such are the extreme evils of poverty in cities , and such the appalling contrast which presents itself to the senses , the judgment , and the heart ,
and which ought long ago to have raised the question , Must these things be ? in a voice of thunder , which would have enforced an answer . It is childish to shrink from the steady contemplation of the fact , that there are thousands upon thousands , in this vast and wealthy city , most wretchedly clothed , and fed , arid lodged ; ignorant and idle , dissolute and wicked ; some born in this state , and others pressed down into it from a better ; and , by their herding together , augmenting the contagiousness of the moral pestilence by which their souls are contaminated . It is worse than childish
to fail at their depravity ; they do but fulfil the destiny which is imposed on them by society $ they do but exhibit the tendencies of the circumstances in which they are placed , and of which they are the victims . What may become their crime , was first their calamity . And there is no calamity like that of abandonment to physical privations , mental darkness , bad passions , corrupting associates * strong temptations , and the perpetual presence
Untitled Article
798 T 7 ie Claims of the Poor on the Followers of Christ .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Dec. 2, 1831, page 798, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2604/page/2/
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