his carriage he went to the city mission and asked for a helper, and then drove to London Bridge, under the shelter of which the penniless poor gather in time of storms.  He took them two by two to shelter, gave them food, and cots on which to sleep, and then returned to his princely home.  We are told that for years after, when Parliament would adjourn at midnight, this young man would go through the slums on his way home, that he might relieve some poor child of misfortune.

On Sunday afternoons, while aristocracy lined the boulevards, this son of fortune would take his physician in his carriage and go through the slums, seeking the sick and suffering.  One afternoon, while he stood outside a tenement door, awaiting the return of the doctor from a visit to a poor sick soul inside the tenement, he became deeply moved by the ragged children playing in the gutters and reaching into garbage barrels for crusts of bread.  He said:  “Ah! here’s the riddle of civilization.  I wish I could help to solve it; perhaps I can.”

He began the establishment of “ragged schools” and into these ware gathered thousands of poor children.  Then followed night schools for boys who had to work by day.  To these schools he added homes for working women, and for these women he persuaded Parliament to give shorter hours of service.  He tore down old rookeries, built neat dwellings instead, beneath the windows planted little flower gardens, and rented them to the poor at the same price they had paid for the rookeries.

When he began to fade, as the leaf fades in its autumn beauty, and the day of his departure was at hand, he said:  “I am sorry to leave the world with so much misery in it, but I have lived to prove that every kind word spoken, and every good deed done, sooner or later returns to bless the giver.”

As the end drew near he said to his daughter:  “Read me the twenty-third Psalm, for ’though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil.’”

A few days later Westminster Abbey was crowded with England’s nobility to do him honor.  When the funeral procession reached Trafalgar Square, thousands of working women stood, with uncovered heads and tearful eyes, to pay their tribute.  Children came from the “ragged schools” bearing banners with the motto:  “I was naked and ye clothed me.”  From the hospitals came the motto:  “I was sick and ye visited me,” while the working girls came with a silk flag on which they had embroidered with their own fingers:  “Inasmuch as ye did it unto the least of these, ye did it unto me.”

Thus loaded down with the fruits of the Spirit, Lord Shaftsbury died, and yet lives in memory as the noblest embodiment of Christian charity.