There are still two parts of the work of the Salvationists to consider—their work with the inmates of the prisons, and their work with the inmates of the brothels. Here again we have everything to learn from them, from them the true disciples of “the divine Communist.” The former work they have made a speciality of, and they are rapidly making the latter. I doubt very much that our churches and chapels (I am not speaking now of the Catholics, whose work is almost exclusively among the Irish, and the Irish are of a race that, save in the matter of agrarian crime and a curious cruelty to dumb animals, is truly admirable for the honesty of its men and the chastity of its women): I doubt very much, I say, that our churches and chapels will ever get much at either the criminals or the prostitutes. Our clergymen, who are so gentlemanly, and our ministers who are so respectable, can neither speak nor understand much the language of the People, the language of the heart. The clergymen are shocked by the foulness, the ministers by the ferocity, of the People. Both feel that they are condescending—the one from the height of refinement, the other from the height of righteousness. The people has no love for condescension of this sort. There are few words that stink more in its nostrils than that of charity, and indeed charity, when it means a gift from a superior to an inferior, is hateful enough. It is a popular delusion with the “charitable” that street beggars and the inmates of the workhouses are the People. Far otherwise is it, O “charitable” ones: these are not independent animals, they are parasites: they are (if you will pardon me saying so) your spiritual lice; so please make the best of them, since it is not only on account of, but _on_, you that they live.
Well, now, wherein is it that these fanatical ignorant Salvationists _do_ get at the People? One of them answers us at once: “_No one’s too wicked for Jesus, and so no one’s too wicked for me who am the simple follower of Jesus._ If _he_ could do with publicans and harlots, why cannot I?” They say, as Walt Whitman says to “a common prostitute,”
“Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you, Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves to rustle for you, do my words refuse to glisten and rustle for you.”