A VIGOROUS SPEECH.

Mataura Ensign, Volume 7, Issue 378, 29 July 1884, Page 5

A VIGOROUS SPEECH.

♦ The address which Dr Parker, the chairman of the Congregational Union, delivered to a crowded congregation in the City Temple London, the occasion being the second meeting of the summer session of the Congregational Ucion, had fo. its title '* Orthodoxy of Heart. It was listened to with rapt attention, diversified with occasional cheers, during the whole of the two hours of its delivery. As the ' Times ' said : — " The j Congregational Union is a body which represents a powerful spiritual organisation. It possesses nearly 4000 churches in the British dominions, its "ministers and missionaries number 3500, and the total number of its adherents is probably not less than a million and a quarter." In the course of his address Dr Parker said: — *• Imagine the gathered hordes of ignorance, misfortune, misery and shame having gone the rounds of all the unions, conferences, assemblies, arid convocations held in the course ©f the ecclesiastical year ; imagine one of the members of that suffering community representing his comrades, and putting their sorrows and their wishes into words, and his speech might take some such turn as this : 'We have had a full year among you, and we cannot very well make out what you are driving at. We do not know most of the long words you use. You are all well dressed and well fed, you are D.D.s and M.A.s and B.A.s. We do not know what you are, or what you want to be at. From what we can make out, you seem to know that we, poor devils, are all going straight down to a place you call Hell. There we are to burn for ever and ever, and gnash our teeth in pain that can never end ; we are to be choked with brimstone, stung by serpents, laden with chains: Then why don't you stop us on the road? Why don't you stand in front of .us and keep us back from the pit, and the fire, and the worm that cannot die ? We read the inky papers which you call your * resolutions,' but in them there is no word for us that is likely tp do us real good. They say nothing about our real misery ; nothing about our long hours, our poor pay, our wretched lodgings. Why don't you pass- resolutions about the distiller, the brewer, and the publican 1 — ('Hear, hear, and applause). v\ c cannot stagger to our warrens and rookeries, where the chairs are stones and the beds are straw, and the pictures are our own blackshadows, without passing the public-house and catching tempting whiffs of the hot drinks that make us worse than beasts. The publican robs us, mocks us, poisons us, and turns us out of doors Why don't you cali him robber and murderer, and drive him out of the land ?— (Tremendous cheering.) He takes your pews, sings your hymns, passes your resolutions, presides at your meetings j and throws a crust to the orphan Avho.se I father he killed. You call yourselves men of God; What God ? Where is He ? What does He say ? What docs He want ? When you come amongst us, you conic agaiDst your will ; some of you live upon us almost as much as the publican does, by writing tales about us, making speeches about us, drawing pictures of us in papers and books, getting our secret of us and then selling it for silver. We have been watching you, and we have formed our opinion of you just as certainly as you have formed your opinion of us. We have seen the auctioneer knock down the cure of souls to the highest bidder ; we have heard the chapel man haggle for higher pay and boast of the respectability of his pew tenants and the gentility of his neighborhood ; we have heard your backbiting of one another — open graves, whited sepulchres, impostors all ! How can ye escape the damnation of hell 1' " -