’Confess your sins.  We monied men confess ours.  We ought to have foreseen the rapid growth of this city.  We ought to have planned and laboured more earnestly for its better organization.  And we freely offer our money, as a sign of our repentance, to build and establish for you institutions which you cannot afford to establish for yourselves.  We excuse you, moreover, in very great part.  You have been gathered together so suddenly into these vast new districts, or rather chaos of houses, and you have meanwhile shifted your dwellings so rapidly, and under the pressure of such continual labour, that you have not had time enough to organize yourselves.  But we, too, have our excuse.  We have actually been trying, at vast expense and labour to ourselves, for the last forty years, to meet your new needs.  But you have outgrown all our efforts.  Your increase has taken us by surprise.  Your prosperity has outrun our goodwill.  It shall do so no more.  We are ready to do our part in the good work of repentance.  We ask you to do yours.  You are more able to do it than you ever were:  richer, better educated, more acquainted with the blessings of association.  We do not come to you as to paupers, merely to help you.  We come to you as to free and independent citizens, to teach you to help yourselves, and show yourselves citizens indeed.’

I hope, ay, I believe, that such an appeal as this, made in an honest and liberal spirit, which proves its honesty and liberality by great and generous gifts out of such private wealth as no nation ever had before, will be met by the masses of London, in the same spirit as that in which it has been made.

I am certain of it, if only the ecclesiastical staff employed by this Fund will keep steadfastly in mind what they have to do.  True it is, and happily true, that they can do nothing but good.  If they confine themselves to the celebration of public worship, to teaching children, to giving the consolations of religion to those with whom want and wretchedness bring them in contact—­all that will be gain, clear gain, vast gain.  But that, valuable, necessary as it is, will not be sufficient to evoke a full response from the people of London.

But if they will, not leaving the other undone, do yet more; if they will attempt the more difficult, but the equally necessary and more permanent labour—­that of attacking the disease of barbarism, not merely in its symptoms, but in its very roots and its causes; if they will recognise the fact, that with the disease there coexists a great deal of sturdy and useful health; if they will have courage and address to face, not merely the non-working, non-earning, and generally non-thinking hundreds, but the working, earning, thinking thousands of each parish; in fact, the men and women who make London what it is; if they will approach them with charity, confidence, and respect; if they will remember that they are justly jealous of that