be it remembered, who were working naked to the waist in the coal-mines, and little children of eight or nine who were carrying half a sack of coals twelve times a day the height of St. Paul’s Cathedral—­the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London left the House of Lords without voting, as the subject did not interest them; while in the lower House Bright and Gladstone both voted against the Bill, Gladstone being the only member who, when the Bill was passed by a bare majority, endeavored to delay its coming into operation!  I ask, Would such a state of things be possible in these days?  Am I not right in saying that new moral forces and sensibilities have been born within us which make such a state of things not only impossible, but simply incomprehensible?

Why then should we despair?  What!  Has God built up His everlasting marble of broken shells, and will He not build up his temple of the future out of these broken efforts of ours?  Has He made His pure and splendid diamond out of mere soot, and shall we refuse to see in the blackest and foulest moral problem the possibilities of the diamond, of a higher life worked out in the process of its solution, reflecting His light and His love?  Has He made His precious sapphire of the mere mud that we tread under our feet, and, when we insist on our little sisters’ being no longer trodden like mud “under foot of vicious men,” may they not in the course of their redemption bring an added hue of heaven to our life, an added purity to home and family, and behold, instead of the old mud, a sapphire throne, and above it the likeness as of a divine man?[45]

But to those who still hang back with a feeling of almost angry repulsion from the whole subject which makes them refuse even to face the perils and temptations of their own boys, I would address no hard words, remembering but too well the terrible struggle it cost me to make this my life work.  Only I would remind them of that greatest act in all history, by which the world was redeemed.  The Cross to us is so associated with the adoration of the ages, so glorified by art, and music, and lofty thought, that we have ceased to realize what it was in actual fact such as no painter has ever dared to portray it; the Cross, not elevated as in sacred pictures, but huddled up with the jeering crowd; the Cross with its ribald blasphemies, its shameful nakedness, its coarse mockeries, its brutal long-drawn torture.  Do you think it cost the women of that day nothing to bear all this on their tender hearts?  Yet what was it that made men draw nearer and nearer, till the women who at first “stood afar off, beholding these things,” we are told, at last “stood by the cross of Jesus”; and, when all men forsook Him and fled, placed themselves heart to heart with the Divine Love bearing the sins of the world and casting them into the abysmal depths of its own being, deeper even than the depths of man’s sin?  What was it but their faithfulness to the Highest that they had known which made them endure the Cross, despising the shame?