the East Ends of London might be represented
each by its cup, sweet wine in the one, and in
the other wine from the "grapes of gall, whose
clusters are bitter." But the East, even where
want is hungriest, is no more wretched for its
poverty than is the West all happy for its
wealth. It is not only that many there who
have no treasures of earth to care for, concentrate
all man's natural desire for wealth upon
the treasures of a future world, and find the
way to spiritual life more easily for being led
by one who prayed to his Father as they too
have prayed, "If it be thy will let this cup pass
from me, yet not my will but thine be done."
In the actual life of the very poor there is a
closer contact with the weighty truths that
have sunk through the light waters above and
lie at the bottom of life's well. For these sufferers
too lie at the bottom of the well. They have not
generally the broken image of sympathy that
shines up through the surface waters of the
fashionable world; the wise and practical
benevolence which forms the subject of this article
excepted. The chief sympathy they get lies
most amongst themselves. It lies close and
touches them. Acts of free service and
ungrudging, unobtrusive aid, visibly interchanged
one to another, represent in their common
intercourse the only form that sympathy can take
where the claim is obvious and incessant upon
mutual help and forbearance. They want
nobody to teach them any theory of society by
which its problems shall be solved. They see
the naked principles of life at wrestle with each
other. For them Greed never wears a mask, or
softens his harsh voice, or bows with a mock-
pliant affability, and hides his claws under his
coat-cuffs, as he does when he makes calls at
the West End. For them Pride does not ape
humility; for them Anger disdains to keep within
the fence of covert irony and satire, but rages
coarse and cruel with a fury unrestrained; Hate,
when he comes among them, beats, kicks, stabs,
and throttles. It is sometimes, said that the
distressed poor, from want of refinement, do not feel
as we fine folk should feel under like
circumstances. Perhaps not. The first sensation of
many of our highly refined selves, if reduced
fairly to like close acquaintance with the
undisguised forces and passions of life, would be as of
the application of stiff besom to the social
cobwebs spun over our eyes.

Down in the East of London, and wherever
else in a Christian land the struggle of life is
reduced to its elements, the conflicting forces
battle about every poor man's way as distinctly
as John Bunyan ever saw them. Terribly real
there is the den in Doubting Castle where the
prisoners of Giant Despair might lie "from
Wednesday morning till Saturday night, without
one bit of bread, or drop of drink, or light,
or any to ask how they did." They feel in all
their flesh the beating they get from the giant's
crab-tree cudgel, and hear him ask, "Why
should you choose life, seeing it is attended
with so much bitterness?" But for these bruised
souls also there is an escape to the Delectable
Mountains, and they are as men walking with
angels when the shepherds of those mountains,
Knowledge, Experience, Watchful and Sincere,
give them welcome and look lovingly upon
them as they ask, "Is there in this place any
relief for pilgrims that are weary and faint by
the way?" And to their asking answer, "The
Lord of these Mountains hath given us a charge
not to be forgetful to entertain strangers;
therefore the good of the place is before you."
We may go down to that east end of our little
world of London—to Spitalfields or Bethnal-
green—whither poverty drifts, and see there,
when we come to know some of its inmates,
men and women walking on the Delectable
Mountains, beholding its gardens and orchards,
its vineyards and fountains of water. We may
find there also tents of the shepherds of the
mountains. Such a tent may look like a little
house in a poor street—there is one at Number
Seven, Brown's-lane, Spitalfields; but by the
suffering poor, who therein find those very
shepherds, Knowledge, Experience, Watchful
and Sincere, their ever ready aids and
comforters, the living truth of life is seen here also
through its shell. If they in their hard struggle
hear, as it were, the hideous roaring of a visible
Apollyon, they see also the Shining Ones as
they walk commonly among them in the land
that is upon the borders of heaven, and even
from Number Seven, Brown's-lane, can see the
not distant radiance of the city of Immanuel.
To the educated mind, with a large element
of speculation in its thoughts of life and of
religion, it is wonderful to note how closely
the spiritual allegory of the tinker's son is
fitted to the real mind of our suffering and
tempted poor. There is a sacred superstition in
the actual images by which all spiritual things
are represented to the mind as half material
realities.

Let us visit now those shepherds of the
mountain in the tent known at Spitalfields as
Number Seven, Brown's-lane. It is the only
house in the lane with steps to its door, a
house into which they who go, go up. As a
public institution it has a very modest name,
for it is called simply "Miss Burdett Coutts's
Sewing School." It is a great deal more than
it calls itself. If we had not called it the tent
of the four shepherds, we might liken it to one
of the fresh fountains upon the Delectable
Mountains, at which pilgrims recovered strength
upon their onward way; a fountain that began
to bubble up three years ago, and pours now a
rich stream of health over a thirsty soil. But
we abide by our faith in it as the tent of the
four shepherds whom Miss Coutts takes into her
pay to carry out her sagacious, well-considered
plan.

Connected with the Brown's-lane Sewing
School is a complete system of carefully-
devised help for the poor of eight districts or
more in Bethnal-green and Spitalfields. There
are no rigidly defined boundaries of action; the
simple desire is to reach with a kind word and a
helping hand all the distress lying round about.