Some voice is still that greeted them On last year's opening day ; Some eyes that dwelt on theirs with love, Last year had days and nights that passed Now there is none to soothe and bless By calm and cheerful bearing! Of smiling back their loving flow, There are, to whom a cup of joy It seems too full for Life to drain- There are, whom still the future lures From present pastures fair, With promise of a fuller life, With whispered "Then !" and "There !" · And there are others, who foresee, No special hope or fear : Their morrows tell the tale inscribed My many friends, how should I find A wish ye all might share? I dare not utter one at all, I change it to a prayer— That He who knows each spirit's wants, May mould your wishes to His will, May give the lonely-patient hearts L. C. C. THE EDINBURGH ORIGINAL RAGGED SCHOOL. EDINBURGH, with the exception, perhaps, of some parts of Paris, is more full than any other town of interesting relics. Modern improvements easily clear away the brick walls that accommodate single families; but massive piles of stone are not so easily removed. Rising six, ten, even twelve and fifteen storeys high, yielding large rents, and swarming with tenants, they long defy old time and modern taste. Built to last, if let alone, till the knell of doom, these old houses of Edinburgh have, with few exceptions, yielded to no element but fire-and a mighty blaze they make! Such accidents, however, being of rare occurrence, that long, lofty, rock-looking ridge, which heaves its back up from the Castle down to Holyrood, has much the same aspect that it had three hundred years ago. Since then the actors are gone, but the stage remains, so little changed, that were he to rise from the dead-though Bishop Latimer would lose himself in modern London-John Knox would feel much at home to-day in the High Street of Edinburgh. Recognising, as he went along, many lofty tenements and quaint old gables with fleur-de-lis and thistle, when he came near the Nether Bow, he would find his old house not very much altered since the day he closed his good fight within its walls, and was carried, the city attending his funeral, to his grave beneath the shadow of St. Giles's crown. Holy Sepulchre; here, Mary of Guise, bringing the blood of persecution into the Stuart race, had her palace and held her gay Court; here, rudely carved coronets mark the town houses of our oldest nobility; here, "Laus Deo" on one house, "Sedes manet optima cœlo" on another, on another, "Praised be the Lord my God, my Strength and my Redeemer," speak of the Reformation and the piety of its times; while here, close under the Castle guns, on this broad esplanade, where loungers gather now to see raw recruits at the goose step, Edinburgh's old burghers met to see treason punished-Lord Forbes lose his head, Lady Glammis burned alive, and traitors of meaner degree, with men and women accused of witchcraft, perish at the fiery stake. In a neighbourhood so full of interesting associations, stands a modern building that disputes the public attention with the relics of the olden time. It is the Original Ragged School; and with an open Bible (the arms of our faith) carved above its door, and nearly 300 children within its walls whom Christian charity has rescued from ruin, it forms the most interesting object there to many. Leaving antiquarians to their dusty and dry researches, many have entered our school, saying, with Moses, "I will turn aside, and see this great sight;" and after visiting Palace, Castle, and the crowd of interesting objects of "mine own romantic town," they have left our Institution, pronouncing it the best sight in Edinburgh. I proceed to relate its history, its rise, its progress, and its success; in all which, the hand of Providence has so often appeared, that we may surely say of it, "This is the Lord's doing; it is marvellous in our eyes." Like Dumbarton, Stirling, Brechin, formerly all places of strength, the capital of Scotland owed its existence to its Castle rock; that formed its nucleus. In troublous times people naturally sought shelter under the wings of such a fortalice; and when invading foes swept the open country, and laid happy homesteads waste with fire and sword, Holland is the only country that appears at the security it afforded, the asylum found with- the period of the Reformation to have anticipated in its walls, illustrate such expressions of Scrip- an increase of population,-and provided for it. ture as this, "The name of the Lord is a strong There the State enacted that whenever a parish tower; the righteous runneth into it, and is safe." added two thousand to its inhabitants, it should The High Street having begun at the Castle, and have an additional minister. But in Scotland there extending from it as the stem of a tree from its never was any such provision; such wise adaptaroot, in that part which lies nearest the rock, as tion of Church and schools to the growth of the we might expect, its oldest and most interesting nation, as men might have been taught by God's relics are found. There many visitors resort; works in nature, where the integument that and in autumn, when the New Town is all but de- covers our bodies stretches with their expansion, serted by its inhabitants, and the flocks on the rocky and trees shed their bark, and the serpent wrigslopes of Arthur's Seat or the neighbouring Pent-gles out of its old skin, and the crab throws off, lands might do worse than try a day's pasture on the grass of our fashionable squares, many are the groups of bearded foreigners, and lean Americans, and rotund Englishmen that are to be seen, with guide-book in hand, diving into the dark closes; or spelling the black letter, or Greek, or Latin inscription above some low-browed door; or gazing up at the lofty tenements where a foul, half-naked creature, with savage look, has thrust its unkempt head through a window from which, once on a day, fair maids of honour, lounging on velvet cushions, watched their gallants ride down the street to drive the English back across the border, or attend Court at Holyrood. Here, with scallop shell on their cloaks, lived knights who had fought for the like an ill-fitting coat, its last year's shell for one suited to a twelvemonth's growth. For instance, St. Cuthbert's or the West Church, once a country parish, lying on the skirts of Edinburgh, came to have the town extended into its fields till its population rose to 60,000 souls, but never another church rose there. It was left with its one parish church, as if the petticoats of a child were fit clothing for a man. In this way, and in the course of time, chiefly, indeed, in the last century-for Scotland never fairly started in the race of progress till the last hope of the Jacobites was quenched in blood on Drummossie Moor-the population of our towns shot far ahead of the means of education and of religious instruction. There were no "children of Issachar which were men that had understanding This is a fair description of the great mass of the of the times, to know what Israel ought to do." people among whom I was called to labour, as one Another cause which largely contributed to the of the ministers of the Old Greyfriars' parish. It ignorance and irreligion that now pervade the low- embraced a considerable portion of the Cowgate, with est strata of our cities, is found in the blight adjoining wynds, courts, and closes; and it was under which so many of the churches withered, only a man in some measure imbued with the and some of them all but died, in the last half spirit of Dr. Chalmers, who could have understood of the eighteenth century. How low the state of him, as one day when we were looking over George morals and religion, even among the ministers Fourth's Bridge, down on smoking chimneys and of the gospel, revealed in the autobiography of old houses, and foul closes, patched windows stuffed Dr. Carlyle of Musselburgh! Think of that poor with rags, and wretched objects creeping along the old man, on the verge of his grave, boasting how dirty street, he turned to me, and, his eye kindling he had stemmed the tide of fanaticism, and with enthusiasm, exclaimed, “"A beautiful field, sir; crushed the bigotry which took offence at mini- a very beautiful field." It was there, or in some sters being play-goers! It appears from his Me- such locality, that, many long years ago, I got moirs that the leading clergy of Edinburgh were my first glimpse of the rude, ignorant, and savage in the habit of spending their evenings at taverns, in state of the children that always swarm thickest the society of leading infidels; there men that pro- where the people are poorest. A student at Colfessed to preach Christ, cracked their jokes and drank lege, I accompanied a friend to a Sabbaththeir claret with men who openly denied the Saviour, school, which to accommodate an acquaintance he and gloried in their infidelity. "I," said the had undertaken to teach for that night. The room Psalmist, 66 am a companion to all them that fear was large and dingy, dimly lighted with candlesthee;" but in David Hume and Adam Smith the there being no gas in those days. The door opened leading clergy had their bosom friends. So low, on such a set of ragamuffins as I had never seen indeed, had the standard, not of religion, but of before; whooping, whistling, yelling, singing. By clerical decorum sunk, that the business of the entreaties, and dint of perseverance, some order was General Assembly was arranged so as to allow the at length established, and a psalm given out to sing. ministers during its sittings to spend their evenings No Orpheus to charm these unruly spirits, my friend in the theatre. So says Dr. Carlyle. He was be- who could not sing, would sing; and his cracked hind the scenes, and knew all about it. And thus, voice and nasal twang was the signal for such an in a court, constituted in the name of our Lord uproar! Poor fellow! he was very good and paJesus Christ, opened with prayer, dealing with the tient; he held on his way till he got to the end of the most solemn matters, these divines hurried through singing, and calling them to join in prayer, unfortheir business to be in time for the Play,-for the tunately closed his eyes. For a moment his Farce at least; seeking compensation for the dreary reverent attitude, and the voice of prayer, seemed, dulness of the forenoon's work in hearty laughter like the voice of Jesus on the stormy waters, to over The Merry Wives of Windsor. This was very produce a great calm. But by and by I heard a shocking; nor are we less shocked to read how one, curious noise, and shall not forget the sight which who professed high orthodoxy, dared to boast of the met my eyes on suddenly opening them; there number of bottles of claret he could carry under his-and behind them a crowd of grinning faces, red belt. How could this have ended but in the utter with efforts to suppress their laughter-stood two ruin of religion, in the loss of all that our godly ragged urchins, each holding a flaming candle under fathers had suffered, fought, and died to attain, my friend's nose, and I could not help thinking unless, in answer to the prayers of a few who sighed that there was a wicked cleverness in this; for it and cried over the abominations of the land, God so happened that this feature of his face always, had returned to visit the vine his own right hand and especially on that winter night, looked very had planted, and that the boar out of the field had cold. wasted. This race of clergy is now extinct, like those monstrous animals which belonged to a former epoch,—and from whose ravages the world is happily delivered. But they have left more than their foot-prints behind them. The mischief they did remains. To meet the wants of a growing population, the State did nothing for education; the Church did less than nothing for religion; and we have to reap the consequence of this neglect and apathy. They stand up there in thousands and tens of thousands, in our large towns who fear neither God, nor man ; who go neither to church, nor chapel; who respect neither Sabbath, nor saint's day; who neither can educate their children, nor care to educate them; who live in the most abject poverty, and indulge in the most shocking vices; whose foul houses, hungry faces, and filthy rags are dreadful to look on in God's creatures; and who die as insensible to the future as the beasts that have no future, and dying, perish. Then I wondered at the wickedness and rudeness of these boys, but I had not been three weeks ministering in the College Wynd and Cowgate, when I saw what accounted for it; and wonder was changed to pity. Of the first 150 I visited in the Old Greyfriars' parish, going from door to door, certainly not more than five attended any place of worship. I wandered in those houses for whole days without ever seeing a Bible, or indeed any book at all. I often stood in rooms bare of any furniture; where father, mother, and half a dozen children had neither bed nor bedding, unless a heap of straw and dirty rags huddled in a corner could be called so. I have heard the wail of children crying for bread, and their mother had none to give them. I have seen the babe pulling breasts as dry as if the starved-looking mother had been dead. I have known a father turn his step-daughter to the street at night-bidding the sobbing girl who bloomed into womanhood, earn her bread there as others were doing. I have bent over the foul pallet of a dying lad to hear him whisper how his father and mother-who were sitting half drunk by the fireside had pulled the blankets off his body to sell them for drink. I have seen children blanched like plants growing in a cellar-for weeks they never breathed a mouthful of fresh air for want of rags to cover their nakedness; and I used often to observe in these dingy dwellings, where the air is poison, and the food is scanty, and the cold is bitter, and short is the gleam of sunshine, and they live in continual terror of a drunken father or mother, and where when they cry they are not kissed but beaten, that the children have an air of sadness, and look as if they never smiled. I don't recollect of ever seeing a mother in these wretched dwellings dandling her infant, or of hearing the little creature crow or laugh as he leapt with joy. There, infants have no toys; and mothers' smiles are rare as sunshine. Nobody can know the misery I suffered amid those scenes of human wretchedness, woe, want, and sin. How often did I sigh for my old country parish, with the larks in blue skies singing over my head, bean fields and golden gorse scenting the air with sweetest odours, primroses and blue-bells springing at my feet, ruddy children hunting butterflies over clover-fields, the strong and swarthy ploughman dandling his babe at the cottage door, the cattle-boy whistling as he drove the herd home, and the loved, glorious sea, emblem of God's mercy and a Saviour's righteousness, gleaming in sunshine from the golden sands, where it broke in measured dash, out beyond the BellRock Tower, that stood up erect amid the surging waters like a Christian amid his trials. But the misery into which I had plunged was not, thank God! suffered in vain. They say, a prophet is prepared in a fiery furnace; and these years of suffering prepared me to do such service as I have rendered to the Ragged School cause. I became acquainted with the condition of the poorest of the poor; and learned to pity, much more than to blame them. I was taught, by many bitter disappointments, and profitless efforts to change the adults, that, though nothing is impossible with God, the best hope of raising the sunken masses lay in working on the rising generation; and I was brought to the conclusion, that unless the yawning gulph which separates these children from education is bridged over by a loaf of bread-unless, in other words, they are fed as well as educated at school-they must remain begging, or stealing, or starving; to sink, if that is possible, into deeper depths of ignorance and crime. In 1841, Sheriff Watson had set up a Ragged School in Aberdeen; and not very long afterwards an opportunity, though not of my seeking, occurred of repeating his experiment in Edinburgh. The congregation of Free St. John's, after building their church, found themselves in possession of a large room in its under-ground storey. We had to consider to what good purpose it could be turned. It was proposed by some to open a Free Church school there. To this I and others objected, on the ground that there was already an adequate number of common schools in the neighbourhood; and that a school below our church could only be filled at the expense of these, and to the injury of their teachers. The neighbourhood swarmed with hundreds of ragged children who-obliged to steal, or beg their food, or starve-neither went, nor could go, to any common school; and with the view of saving a few of these, I proposed that the congregation should set up and maintain a ragged, feeding, industrial school, for some twenty or thirty waifs. The proposal was agreed to; and orders were given for the necessary apparatus of soup-boiler and porridge-pot. But the morning came; and schemes sometimes, as well as spangles, look different in day from what they do in gas, or candle-light. Some of our office-bearers got, and not very unnaturally, alarmed at the responsibilities we were about to incur; and in consequence the attempt was abandoned. But the hope of saving poor creatures from the wreck, was too dear, and had been too nearly realized to be abandoned without a further struggle. Baffled in this direction, another lay open to me. I might leave the limits of St. John's congregation, and of the Free Church, to launch out on the open sea; I might throw myself on the Christian public, irrespective of sect or party; for were these children saved, it was nothing to me to what church they might attach themselves, or whose arm plucked them from destruction. Having undertaken to come forward with £70 for supporting a Ragged School under our church, and not having £70 nor £7 to spare, I had, with the view of appealing to friends for aid, laid down the keel of my First Plea. Let no man think poverty an unmitigated evil; for if I had been able to spare £70, I had never projected a Plea, nor run the risk of being crushed in the Press. And let no man lose heart, and abandon a good scheme because he meets chopping seas, and cross winds at the outset, since God may be thereby driving him on a better course, and toward greater ends than he ever dreamt of. On my little pet scheme being abandoned, I said, in the bitterness of my heart, "All these things are against me;" but God, who had planned a much greater and more catholic enterprise, was saying, "My ways are not as your ways; and my thoughts are not as your thoughts." The Plea was at length prepared and published. It fell on Edinburgh as falls a spark into a powder magazine. The public mind had been prepared for the scheme; and like a great mountain-stone, which rains and melting snows had been silently undermining for years, it only needed a push to set the mass in motion. Leaving him that moved it to wonder at the effect, away it went-taking grand, joyful bounds, and bearing all before it. All men were ready to sing over the birth of this Christian enterprise. They hailed the proposal to establish it on a broad, unsectarian basis. The judges of the land, who had long mourned in secret over the practical injustice of the law, and public prosecutors who had reluctantly placed infants at the bar, and asked for sentence on creatures more fit to be pitied than punished, were among the foremost with offers of support; all sectarian feelings were engulfed in a flowing tide of common love and pity; and money poured in on us in shoals of letters, some bearing the stamp of coronets, and some the stamp of thimbles. At length our schools were opened with an at tendance of two score boys and girls; and as these were broken in, we increased the number. They all received three good meals; they came to school before breakfast, and left it after supper; they went through daily ablutions; they were trained so many hours to work, and led out so many to walk; they were taught to read, write, and cypher; they received religious instruction-reading, and being examined on the Bible. Our superintendent, Mr. Gibb, soon won their affections, and was himself a prince of teachers. Our Committee of Management, consisting of Episcopalians and Established Churchmen, United Presbyterians and Free Churchmen, Baptists and Independents, worked together in happy harmony; and for a while we had fulfilled to us the beautiful prayer of an Indian chief, " May your council fire never go out, and may your sky be without a cloud." The cloud came at length, and brought a storm. It happened thus. Nearly half of the wretched outcasts whom we had gathered into the school, and were saving from a life of crime and misery, were the children of nominal Roman Catholics. Some of these had no parents; and those who had, belonged to a class of Papists that had sunk like too many of their nominally Protestant neighbours into practical heathenism. These children, all foul and ragged, were taught to beg and steal, or left to starve; nor until we made an effort to save them, had either prelate or priest done else than leave them to their fate-passing by on the other side. I never, indeed, literally saw a priest pass by on the other side, for, though my almost daily walk, some twenty years ago, was in the Cowgate, I never saw a priest there at all. They might have had other duties to do than to go forth like the good shepherd after their lost sheep. But so it was. The girls were left to grow up prostitutes, and the boys to become thieves. So soon, however, as these poor children were gathered into our school, and taught to read God's blessed Word, Popery rose to rescue them from so great a danger. Father Keenan of Dundee was careless enough to show the cloven foot. He in effect boldly stated that he would prefer to see the children perish in the streets rather than get food and education and God's Word in the Dundee Ragged Schools: "For Heaven's sake," exclaimed this zealot, as if he could be ignorant that these creatures had no faith, and grew up polluted from their earliest years, "let them, spotless and with unshaken faith, perish to the world, rather than live in abundance, purchased at such risk, and perish eternally!" In Edinburgh, the tools of Rome, keeping behind the scenes, acted with more caution, shrewdly guessing that grand speeches from the lips of Popish priests, on behalf of toleration and religious liberty, would sound queer to those who had read of the fires of Smithfield and St. Andrews, of the tortures of the Inquisition, and the bloody massacre of St. Bartholomew. I have no wish to rake up the ashes of an old controversy; and since most of those with whom we had to fight are in their graves, it would be unseemly to exult over their defeat. Requiescat in pace. We insisted that every child in our school should read and be instructed daily in the Word of God, without asking the priest's leave whether he would or would not. We held that to be the really sectarian school that excludes the Bible from all or any; even as the Popish is really the sectarian decalogue, since it excludes the Second Commandment-and to make up the ten, splits the tenth into two. The gentleman who headed the opposition was incautious enough to state in his speech, as I heard with my own ears, and an astonished public heard with theirs, and the newspapers reported-although the statement was omitted in his revised speech-that when in Ireland he had been told by Roman Catholics themselves, "that for a consideration they would rather be guilty of shooting a man, than of eating flesh on Friday ;" and the thrill of horror with which this was heard, proved that the citizens of Edinburgh would never consent to have the children they had adopted served with such "serpent" food. We held that in a Ragged School, whatever might be the case in other schools, the object aimed at could not be accomplished without the pure milk of God's Word for these babes, and that the principle-although some good men among our opponents seemed to have lost sight of it in the dust of battle-was the irreconcilable and eternal difference between Protestantism and Popery; the principle that God has addressed His Word to all the human family. We held firmly to this, that its free use is as much man's heaven-bestowed right, as the free use of God's air, and sun. Holding that no party, whether priest or presbyter, has any right to interfere between a parent and child, and holding also, that in having adopted these children whom we clothed, fed, and educated, we were placed to them in loco parentisin the position of parents-we felt as much bound to instruct them as to instruct our own children in the saving truths of the gospel. We had entered on the solemn responsibility of being their "keepers;" and there lies the plain difference between the position of the directors of a Ragged School, and that of the patrons or managers of ordinary schools. Well, the dispute between us and those, who, some of them not intending it, fought for Popish intolerance, was referred on their own motion to the decision of an Edinburgh public. The city was stirred to its depths: the Music Hall was filled to overflowing; and after a fair stand-up fight for four hours before the leading men of Edinburgh on the platform, and a magnificent audience in the area and gallery of the house, the question was put to the vote. I have seen nothing more glorious than the forest of hands that rose up to approve our principles, and few things so ludicrous as the five hands raised on the other side-a feeling which they indeed seemed to share to whom the hands belonged, for, greeted with a peal of laughter, the hands went down like a duck in the water at the shot of a gun. There was great joy that day in Edinburgh; and many who, like Eli, had been trembling for the Ark of God, when they saw us come back, with colours flying, from the field of a most important victory, gave thanks to Him to whom we sung, "Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight." Relieved from the presence of those between whom and us there could be no concord, our course since has been one of unbroken harmony and marvellous success. |