“What Tom’s one year of Christian life had done! And all around were lives as precious – not all as gifted, but everyone as capable of being filled with the spirit of God – sinking to the low level of a careless, tippling life – drifting up to the great cities, where we call them ‘redundant masses’, and wonder how to endure the pressure of so great a multitude – and each unit might be a temple of the Holy Ghost. For Tom himself might have sunk with all the rest, into the slough, had no hand arrested him. And Christians can live to dress and dine, and think it much to spend an hour a week in surface labour, while this tremendous ruin of the most precious thing created is going on.”
E. B. BAYLY
There is work which everyone of us ought to be doing at our very doors. You have a fellowship, everyone of you, in this solidarity of evil. You cannot wipe off from your souls, as with a wet cloth, as though it were no concern of yours, the stains left by the sins of others. From each one of you radiates invisibly an interminable web work, of which the implicated consequences, if summed together, are incalculable. But if it be so in evil. . . . so is it also, thank God! with any good you do; it may put on white robes, and go forth as an angel to bless the world. Oh, if we could all, everyone of us, be made to feel how awful is our common responsibility for the general evil, how urgent is our individual duty to labour for the common good, we should see in a regenerated world the fulfilment of the olden prophecy. . . . “
Archdeacon FARRAR
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