Sunday 13: Ezekiel xviii 32 (text follows)
Monday 14: Attended meeting at the Town Hall in aid of Additional Curates for populous Towns and was very much pleased by the speech of Rev. E. Mauro (?) incumbent of Harrow Weald.
He described in most graphic manner his visits to a body of navvies who were at work on a branch line from the North Western; he had been told it would be utterly futile to attempt to speak of Salvation to them, but, notwithstanding their forbidding appearance, resolved to make the attempt; he selected a public house, where 21 of the seemingly most reprobate lodged; he was shown upstairs to their bedroom, and to his great astonishment and delight, he found at the further end of the room, seated on a box beneath the window, a young man in the garb of a navvy reading the bible aloud, and most of his comrades paying marked attention to him; he was not long in learning the history of the young man:- he found that at the age of 17 he left his mother on bender knees, - a fatherless boy to seek a subsistence by the sweat of his brow on the numerous railways then being formed; he fell into evil habits and in a fit of drunkenness struck his comrade down and left him for dead; providentially the man recovered but the youth was sentenced to a term of penal servitude in New South Wales;- here he was taught the blessings of that holy Word which he had never had the opportunity of hearing in his own country which might have prevented from committing that crime for which he suffered the penalty of the law.
Whenever he visited the navvies, whether under the hayrick, the hedge, or in the taproom, he always found some of them ready to hear him, and to their credit, be it said, he never met with insult; in fact if anyone of them felt inclined for ridicule, he was immediately put down by others of his comrades.
The Rev. gentleman also described his visits to the colliery districts. On one occasion the colliers were told he was coming to say a few words to them, and when he descended the pit he found they had debarred themselves of a day's pay by erecting seats all over the bottom of the pit, and at one end placing a cart bottom upwards for him to stand upon to address them.
The description of the colliers and the pit were most striking; the immense expanse of the pit extending as far as the eye could reach; youths sitting on rugged projections of coal, scarcely perceptible in the distance from the peculiar nature of the lights, gave it an almost unearthly appearance, and made him proud of such a congregation in such a place.
Does this not shew the need of such a Society? How many thousand of pounds are collected to send missionaries abroad, while the masses of our overcrowded and populous towns are left to grope in darkness, uncared for, unthought of.
