Note 15 — Chapter I · THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE LABORING CLASSES.

The decay of religion among the working classes was the subject of a conference of working-men, held in London in 1867. Mr. J. M. Ludlow, one of their friends and counsellors, writes as follows in the “Progress of the Laboring Classes from 1832 to 1867,” concerning their reasons for forsaking religious services: “At the bottom of those reasons there may be felt, not dislike or indifference to the Gospel itself, but, on the contrary, a deep yearning for some mighty manifestation of it. The complaint is not that Christianity is given, but that ‘priests and parsons’ have given of it ‘short weight and short measure;’ not that it is practised by its professors, but that their practice falls so far short of their professions; not that clergymen and minister intermeddle with the working-men, but that they do not come among them and show practical sympathy with them in their undertakings. Surely a temper like this, even when speaking out through hard and scornful words, instead of discouraging Christian ministers, should brace and quicken them to their work—ay, though that work should consist partly in the shaking off of their most cherished traditions and habits of religious thought” (p. 279).