MR. B1TLLEN!S "APOSTLES OF THE SOUTH-EAST."* WE gather from some

remarks at the beginning of this book that the immediate motive of its production was the wish to controvert an unfortunate misstatement occurring in an official report of Anglican inspiration upon the religious— .or irreligious—condition of South London. A clergyman of the Established Church had particularised Lupin Street, Rotherhithe, as "a black spot where religion was not and

• Tho Apostles of the South•East. By Frank T. Bullen. London : Hodder

sad Stoughton. [66.1 the people loved to have it so " ; and the document incorpo- rating the mistake—for a mistake it most assuredly was— had the endorsement of . a Bishop. Offence was taken by those who knew better than the Bishop and his informant what was going on in this and many similar back-streets of London, and Mr. Millen, who is " the companion of all them that fear God," has come forward as the champion and the historian of the " Wren Lane Mission " as conducted by Jemmy Maskery the sweep and Saul the. seaman. The story is touching and impressive, and fully establishes what we believe to be the real point about which Mr. Bullen is zealous,—that there are no actually godless corners anywhere in the world, simply because though men may forget God, God does not forget men, and in some way or other witness is borne to the truth of the spiritual life in the darkest times and the most seemingly abandoned places.

But it is interesting and instructive to find that, in spite of Mr•. Bullen's cordial respect and admiration for the heroic evangelisers of Lupin Street, he is very much in agreement with the " Churches " as to the disadvantages necessarily attending the work of small self-constituted and uneducated Christian bodies. He recognises that it is not only by the Established Church and the Roman Catholics that the work of small communions like the " Wren Lane Mission" is feared and ignored, but by all the large bodies of Christian wor- shippers,—the Baptists, Congregationalists, Wesleyan. And

he sums up very fairly the general objection of the " sects " when he tells us how they—

"Have long regarded such small gatherings with distrust and dislike, feeling, what is no doubt in a certain measure true, that small bodies of uneducated men and women like these, without any visible head possessed of a certain definite knowledge of theology, are apt to drift into all sorts of strange bye-paths of heresy from which a little grounding in theology would have saved them. In other words, it is felt that so long as they confine themselves to preaching the Gospel that has been the Power of God unto their salvation, they do a mighty work in perhaps the best possible way : but that when they take to expounding Scripture in the seclusion of the ' Hall' to members of the Church, they do a great deal of harm, not merely by the dissemination of false doctrines, but by the generation of much heated angry feeling one towards another."

Fortunately Mr•. Bullen attempts no definition either of " heresy " or "false doctrine," so that his book raises no con- troversial points. But he has a good deal to say from per- sonal knowledge and experience about the squabbles and jealousies arising out of the angry feeling generated by doctrinal disagreement, and the " fissiparous " tendency con-

sequent upon them. The most orthodox Churchman could not give us better practical reasons for upholding or desiring Catholic authority and unity. But we must take the world as it is, and recognise thankfully the influence for good of the vital faith and heroic energy of such men as he describes.

Lupin Street, Mr. Bullen tells us, is a back-street of Rotherhithe, commanding from its roof-tops a view of the masts of the ships in the Surrey Commercial Docks, and within very easy access—for those who know the way— of the Docks themselves. The population is semi-nautical in habits and occupations, and as to manners and morale notably mixed. But it is not a criminal street :—" keen-eyed men with bowler hats and closely buttoned overcoats never made a raid upon any of the dirty houses, and emerged taking with them furtive-looking prisoners." The tenants of the fifty-two houses of Lupin Street make altogether a " hard crowd, indifferent honest," and the majority of them are more

addicted to loafing at the " public " round the corner than to working at any calling. But out of the fifty-two houses' mostly " slummy " in the extreme, ten stand out conspicuously clean and respectable. Their doorsteps are industriously scoured, their muslin blinds are scrupulously white, and Mr. Bullen knows exactly how much those blinds cost per yard, and how many times they will stand the wash-tub. He knows also how many " penn'orths " of hearthstone and how many scrubbings per week it takes to keep those doorsteps clean. Indeed the wealth of detail given as to the interiors and exteriors of these houses in Lupin Street makes the book an invaluable contribution to that knowledge of how the poor live which the modern philanthropist is so eager to possess. It is, moreover, so clearly given that it makes a very graphic picture.

The tenants of these respectable houses were, at the time Mr. Bullen writes of, two riggers, two stevedores, two ship. wrights, a sailmaker, a tugboat skipper, a painter, and a sweep, "and this little company of bard-working men not only leavened the whole of Lupin Street and the courts adjacent by their practice of cleanliness, but they also supplied its religious savour." For reasons of their own, none of these men were attracted by the Churches or the " sects," or even by the Salvation Army. They met for prayer and Bible- reading and " breaking of bread " at the house of their leader, Jemmy Maskery the sweep, until the day came when it became possible to rent for £15 a year a disused cowshed in a blind alley running out of the street. And, by the way, the history of this shed and its condemnation as unsanitary by the London County Council affords one among many little side- glimpses into Rotherhithe life which add to the value of Mr. B alien's book. The tale of how the money was sub- scribed by these working men, and how the shed was transformed into a conventicle by their voluntary labour, is an important part of the main history. But to follow it all in detail is impossible in a review, and in some respects it would be undesirable even if possible.

About questions of taste it is idle to dispute. But we cannot help wishing that Mr. Sullen bad told his tale more shortly.

It is good to be made acquainted with such simple, manly, God-fearing men as Jemmy Maskery and his friend Saul. The details of their self-devotion and their generosity put most of us who have leisure and affluence to shame, while the picture of their loyal friendship for one another warms the heart of the reader. But the more sympathetically one enters into the lives of these rough apostles of Christianity, the more is one moved to wish that Mr. Bullen had not reproduced at

such full length, and with so much realistic detail, the words of their prayers and their thoughts and their conversations. Especially are we inclined to protest against the literalness that reproduces in print ignorant and vulgar mispronuncia- tions of sacred words and names. The practice—though obviously it does not strike all minds in the same manner—

has an appearance of irreverence which offends the taste of many serious-minded people (the present reviewer among the number), and it savours also of something like impertinence towards those whose speech is reproduced. Moreover, this fulness of verbal detail suggests—whether with or without justice we cannot say—a doubt as to whether the book is to be accepted as a simple chronicle of fact, or only as a romance founded upon fact. For our own part, we should be sorry to learn that Jemmy Maskery and Saul were not real men, and their story, as told by Mr. Bullen, true history. Yet if this be so, we wince, for their sakes, as much as our own, at some of the details of their most sacred and intimate spiritual experiences and exercises.

To return, however, to some practical aspects of Mr. Bullen's book. He has much to say out of personal ex- perience upon the Sunday labour question, and his testimony is strong upon the desirability of keeping out the " Con- tinental Sunday." With his customary frankness and sim- plicity, he goes back to the days when the question touched him personally, as a hard-working man in very humble cir- cumstances :—

" Employed from nine to five in a quasi-government office at a meagre salary, I tried to eke out, in the hours that should have been devoted to recreation and reading, that salary by working at the trade of a picture-framer, a trade I had taught myself. When business was brisk this often necessitated my being in my workshop at 2 a.m. in order to fulfil the contracts I had made to deliver frames at a certain time. It also meant my working up till sometimes as lath as 11 p.m. So that when Sunday came, with its placid, restful morning, I always felt profoundly grate- ful, not only for the bodily rest, but for the way in which I was able to throw off the mental worries of the week."

Mr. Bullen kept his Day of Rest holy as well as free from workaday cares, and he found time also to help his wife in preparing the dinner, and in doing other household jobs. But apart from those who spend Sunday religiously, he is satisfied that the vast majority of the men of the working class who go neither to church nor chapel are as much averse as he is to "such an abolition of one day's rest in seven as may be seen on the Continent." About one practice that militates against the Sunday rest he is very eloquent and very practical, and that is the late shopping on Saturday night. For this habit be acknowledges that a certain measure—about 5 per cent.— of the responsibility rests with the men who stay in the

public-houses until they are necessarily turned out on the stroke of twelve on Saturday nights, and then only hand over the remainder of their wages to their wives. But the bulk of the evil lies at the door of the women, who put off their shop- ping to the last moments of the last day of the week, partly out of sheer idleness, and partly out of a mean avarice which suggests the hope of getting a good bargain out of an exhausted shopkeeper in the small hours. Well may Mr. Bullen describe this system as a cruel "persecution of the poor by the poor."