第92章 ASSISTANCE IN GENERAL.(5)

The moment you set about dealing with the wants of the people,you discover that many of their difficulties are not material,but moral.There never was a greater mistake than to imagine that you have only to fill a man's stomach,and clothe his back in order to secure his happiness.Man is,much more than a digestive apparatus,liable to get out of order.Hence,while it is important to remember that man has a stomach,it is also necessary to bear in mind that he has a heart,and a mind that is frequently sorely troubled by difficulties which,if he lived in a friendly world,would often disappear.A man,and still more a woman,stands often quite as much in need of a trusted adviser as he or she does of a dinner or a dress.

Many a poor soul is miserable all the day long,and gets dragged down deeper and deeper into the depths of sin and sorrow and despair for want of a sympathising friend,who can give her advice,and make her feel that somebody in the world cares for her,and will help her if they can.

If we are to bring back the sense of brotherhood to the world,we must confront this difficulty.God,it was said in old time,setteth the desolate in families;but somehow,in our time,the desolate wander alone in the midst of a careless and unsympathising world."There is no-one who cares for my soul.There is no creature loves me,and if I die no one will pity me,"is surely one of the bitterest cries that can burst from a breaking heart.One of the secrets of the success of the Salvation Army is,that the friendless of the world find friends in it.There is not one sinner in the world--no matter how degraded and dirty he may be--whom my people will not rejoice to take by the hand and pray with,and labour for,if thereby they can but snatch him as a brand from the burning.Now,we want to make more use of this,to make the Salvation Army the nucleus of a great agency for bringing comfort and counsel to those who are at their wits'end,feeling as if in the whole world there was no one to whom they could go.

What we want to do is to exemplify to the world the family idea.

"Our Father"is the keynote.One is Our Father,then all we are brethren.But in a family,if anyone is troubled in mind or conscience,there is no difficulty.The daughter goes to her father,or the son to his mother,and pour out their soul's troubles,and are relieved.If there is any serious difficulty a family council is held,and all unite their will and their resources to get matters put straight.This is what we mean to try to get done in the New Organisation of Society for which we are labouring.We cannot know better than God Almighty what will do good to man.We are content to follow on His lines,and to mend the world we shall seek to restore something of the family idea to the many hundreds of thousands--ay,millions--who have no one wiser or more experienced than themselves,to whom they can take their sorrows,or consult in their difficulties.

Of course we can do this but imperfectly.Only God can create a mother.

But Society needs a great deal of mothering,much more than it gets.

And as a child needs a mother to run to in its difficulties and troubles,to whom it can let out its little heart in confidence,so men and women,weary and worn in the battles of life,need someone to whom they can go when pressed down with a sense of wrongs suffered or done,knowing that their confidence will be preserved inviolate,and that their statements will be received with sympathy.I propose to attempt to meet this want.I shall establish a department,over which I shall place the wisest,the pitifullest,and the most sagacious men and women whom I can find on my staff,to whom all those in trouble and perplexity shall be invited to address themselves.It is no use saying that we love our fellow men unless we try to help them,and it is no use pretending to sympathise with the heavy burdens which darken their lives unless we try to ease them and to lighten their existence.

Insomuch as we have more practical experience of life than other men,by so much are we bound to help their inexperience,and share our talents with them.But if we believe they are our brothers,and that One is our Father,even the God who will come to judge us hereafter for all the deeds that we have done in the body,then must we constitute,in some such imperfect way as is open to us,the parental office.

We must be willing to receive the outpourings of our struggling fellow men,to listen to the long-buried secret that has troubled the human heart,and to welcome instead of repelling those who would obey the Apostolic precept:"To confess their sins one to another."Let not that word confession scandalise any.Confession of the most open sort;confession on the public platform before the presence of all the man's former associates in sin has long been one of the most potent weapons by which the Salvation Army has won its victories.That confession we have long imposed on all our converts,and it is the only confession which seems to us to be a condition of Salvation.But this suggestion is of a different kind.It is not imposed as a means of grace.

It is not put forward as a preliminary to the absolution which no one can pronounce but our Lord Himself.It is merely a response on our part to one of the deepest needs and secret longings of the actual men and women who are meeting us daily in our work.Why should they be left to brood in misery over their secret sin,when a plain straightforward talk with a man or woman selected for his or her sympathetic common-sense and spiritual experience might take the weight off their shoulders which is crushing them into dull despair?