It’s been clear for at least 50 years that the United States desperately needs both Revival and Reformation, a movement toward Christ that influences both hearts and minds. It has also become evident that we need Reunion, the coming together of rich and poor in a way that produces action by hands and feet.
In 2012 Manhattan could boast of 31 developments in which a 2,300-square-foot condo would sell for at least $5 million. Seven fat years later, that number has more than tripled. Some are in parts of the city where neighbors a block away are at least relatively poor, so development owners are creating ways for residents not to have to leave their buildings.
Among the ways, according to a May 21 New York Times article: Owners build in plush film screening rooms and indoor soccer fields, bring in mobile florists and pet portrait makers, and feature classes on blindfolded dancing and dream decoding. It’s the 21st-century version of a change Edinburgh went through in the 19th century.
Let’s back up a bit. During the 17th century and most of the 18th, the rich and poor of Edinburgh lived in close proximity. The ground floors of tenements on narrow, cobbled alleys called “closes” had shops, workshops, and pubs whose owners or renters lived on the floor directly above. Above them (and above the filth and stench of the streets) lived lawyers and doctors. At the very top, in cramped space, were the poor.
Starting in 1767 and escalating into the 1840s, though, Edinburgh in an early form of city planning created New Town, with wide, straight streets and Georgian buildings: That’s where merchants, professionals, and aristocrats lived. As they stopped interacting daily with the poor, out of sight was also out of mind. Today, a 1910 statue of the 1840s Presbyterian pastor who thought deeply about the poor, Thomas Guthrie, is close to the border between Old Edinburgh and New Town. I asked passersby who Guthrie was. None knew. But his efforts changed lives in the 19th century and are a model for 21st-century action as well.
In the 1840s, few pastors had contact with hundreds of ragged children and their often-inebriated parents. In 1845 the Edinburgh jail reported that 740 children under the age of 14 had been in prison during the previous three years. The following year Charles Dickens called children like those “the most miserable and neglected outcasts … a wretched throng, foredoomed to crime and punishment.”
Dickens’ florid description shows how such children in London and Edinburgh appeared to the middle class: “ragged, wretched, filthy, and forlorn … perfectly confounded and perverted in their minds … creatures steeped in degradation … young thieves and beggars—with nothing natural to youth about them: with nothing frank, ingenuous, or pleasant in their faces; low-browed, vicious, cunning, wicked; abandoned of all help but this; speeding downward to destruction; and unutterably ignorant.”
Guthrie’s view of “street urchins” differed from Dickens’. Guthrie wrote, “Bedded in their dark and dismal abodes, precious stones lie there, which only wait to be dug out and polished, to shine, first on the earth, and hereafter and forever in a Redeemer’s crown.” Guthrie wasn’t rosy-eyed about children who sometimes survived by stealing and prostituting themselves. But he wasn’t angry with them: He was angry with ladies in silk and gentlemen in broadcloth who carried Bibles to church and prayer meetings but ignored wretches in the gutter.
Andrew Murray, an Edinburgh charity leader who has amply researched Guthrie, says his subject’s statue on Princes Street “epitomises what many of us in the Christian church are seeking to achieve. With a Bible in one hand and his other hand resting protectively on a ‘ragged child,’ Guthrie’s life combined the two great priorities of the church—truth and love.”
“Long Tom” Guthrie was an impressive 6-foot-4, but his early career didn’t impress anyone: He spent nearly 10 years at university and seminary studies, and then five more without obtaining a church position. That hard experience turned out to be a blessing, because he learned about science, banking, and other fields. Guthrie later argued that pastors were more effective when they were “less shut up in their own shells, and had more common sense and knowledge of the world.”
As Murray notes, Guthrie combined Reformed theology with an accessible style—although in keeping with 19th-century practice his sentences were sometimes longer and more flowery than we’d prefer today. Guthrie described how he “studied the style of the addresses which the ancient and inspired prophets delivered to the people of Israel, and saw how, differing from the dry disquisitions or a naked statement of truths, [their statements] abounded in metaphors, figures, and illustrations.”
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