NED WRIGHT.* " Nevertheless it moves." As we shut this
curious book, and tried to think it over, and for the thousandth time think out the problem it presents, these words forced themselves most obtrusively upon our attention. Every law of good taste was broken, our deepest and highest feelings wounded, our sense of harmony utterly set aside, our common-sense outraged, we were ready to rise in rebellion. We bad our own notions of the deal- ings of God with men, and this was not our way ; yet we could not but see that the ex-thief was standing on a vantage-ground, and that all our protests were powerless, while he could point to the dead mass all our msthetic principles could never touch, and say, " At my voice it moves." We have a few facts before us in these pages; that they are facts, so far as reliable testimony can be had, we have ascertained elsewhere ; the name of the hero in the story has become familiar to most of our readers in connection with the accounts which have from time to time appeared of his " thieves' soup suppers." He appears to have been one of those incorrigible boys upon whom all teaching is lost. The son of pious though poor parents, he was by no means a mere waif in the midst of better cared-for children ; but sent from one school to another, he was dismissed alike from all, voted by the neighbours " a peat of a boy." With an innate propensity to thieve, and as he grew older,
• Incidents in the Life of Edward Wright. By Edward Leach. Hodder and Stoughton, Paternoster Row. London : 1870. profligate and drunken, with the exception of physical courage, and when sober, which was but seldom, a dislike to cruelty, he seems to have had but few redeeming points in his character. Considering that he brutally assaulted his mother, was summoned for ill-treatment of his wife, and made the lives of his little children miserable, our exempting him from the charge of being naturally cruel will probably appear strange to the casual reader ; it is true, nevertheless, as any one will perceive who cares carefully to analyze the facts. After five-and-twenty years of a life in which he had become steeped to the very lips in crime, the turning-point in his history arrived ; it was Easter Day, and on the following Monday he was engaged for a prize-fight. Want of success in recent robberies had left him without money, and he was now placing all his hopes on his success in the fight ; the better to ensure this, he proposed on the preceding evening to his wife that she should accompany him to Pimlico, lest any of his companions should call and tempt him to drink. On their way they were accosted by a boy who informed them that a working- man was to speak at Astley's that night. Ned and his wife, partly out of curiosity, partly to pass away the time, strolled in, about the most meanly-clad, wretched couple in that motley throng. We will not stay to investigate the style, manner, or matter of the sermon ; whatever it was in itself, if there be any facts in the spiritual as in the natural world, it was a divine message to Ned and his wife. We may recoil from the jargon in which men write the details of such a case as this, but put it in what phrase we will—and all language in such cases serves rather to hide our ignorance than to express our thought—this man left Astley's that night with a principle of life quickened within him sufficiently powerful to utterly change not only his outward life, but the language, ideas, and aspirations of the man. Chunder Sen, in a sentence full of profound truth, says, " You can only kill passion with passion ;" a new passion sufficient to extinguish every other had seized Ned's nature. Through whatever medium, a sense of the intense evilness of evil had come upon him, a new idea of life and eternity. " Whosoever believeth in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life ;" the words, quoted till the mind recoils from their too familiar use, came upon him in the fresh- ness of their first power, and Ned Wright, the pest of police- men, the terror of the neighbourhood, became Ned the Evangelist. Does any one want a testimony to his sincerity ? Out of a salary of twenty-three shillings a week he contrived to save enough "to pay of the debts contracted in his unconverted days." But honest wages even of a pound a week were not easy to get by an ex-thief ; the history of Jean Valjean is not without its parallel in the more common struggles of men vainly seeking to regain a lost social foothold, and one infinitely worse than Jean Valjean was here. Ned obtained work as a lighterman, and by his good conduct got promoted to the place of foreman, when some one informed his employer of his previous history, and he was summarily ejected ; for thirteen weeks he tramped the streets of London seeking work, but finding none ; it was part of his new education, and has been one secret of his present success. One of his chief objects is to procure honest employment for thieves who are willing to quit their present mode of life. His success as a missionary or evangelist has been great. Devoting himself ex- clusively to social pariahs, to the most degraded of the criminal class, touching the lowest depths in haunts of which the ordinary visitor among the poor knows not even the existence, and which it would be at the peril of his life for a clergyman to attempt to enter, speaking fluently the fearful jargon known only to the initiated, he gathers round him hundreds of these moral lepers (happily few even dream what the lives of professional thieves must be, their ill- gotten gains spent quickly in the very necessity of being hidden, and the greater part consumed in drink). And it is at least worth while to see with what lever he raises them out of the moral mud in which their souls are clogged. As we read his shoutings of " Eternity ! " " Eternity !" of his rushing through the streets of Glasgow repeating passages of Scripture, or advertising himself as "a man who had been dead five-and-twenty years but had been brought to life in a mysterious way, and would appear at the Abercorn Rooms next evening," we know there must be a power of an utterly different nature underlying all this noise, and of which this is the mere 'spume and sputter.' We look at the results, and cannot doubt he takes a message to these people which somehow is the power of God unto salvation to every man that receives it. We scarcely recognize what the message is, in the jargon into which he translates it ; but this, is after all, the patois understood by the people he addresses. And it is possibly because we are so utterly unacquainted with that patois, so little accus- tomed to the images most familiar to the minds of these classes,
that most men find it so difficult to touch what seems to them an utterly blank spiritual nature. After all, it is no new thing which is thus coarsely proclaimed, " The gift of God is eternal life through
Jesus Christ." That, translated into their own tongue, is the message he has for them, and the wisest intellect on earth, has nothing greater to offer. But where is the secret of success ? There is a chord in the hearers' mind somewhere which responds,.
and Mr. Wright knows, from sympathy, probably, which to touch. The sound to us may be discordant enough :—
" How it happens, I understand well.
A tune was born in my head last week Out of the thump-thump and shriek-shriek Of the train, as I came by it, up from Manchester ; And when, next week, I take it back again, My head will sing to the engine's clack again, While it only makes my neighbour's haunches stir, Finding no dormant musical sprout In him, as in me, to be jolted out."
We cannot express our meaning better than in the same poet's words :—
" For the preacher's merit or demerit,
It were to be wished the flaws were fewer• In the earthen vessel holding treasure, Which lies as safe in a golden ewer ; But the main thing is, does it hold good measure ?
Heaven soon sets right all other matters !— Ask, else, those ruins of humanity, This flesh worn out to rags and tatters, This soul at struggle with insanity, Who thence take comfort, can I doubt, Which an empire gained, were a loss without."
Mr. Ruskin is trying hard, in common with many other philan- thropists, (how he would hate us for the word !) to improve the condition of the lower, he would say the lowest, classes by improv- ing their dwellings and utterly forbidding the use of cellars, those strongholds of evil, as human dwellings-places, and it is impossible to over-rate the value of his work ; still there is no doubt the really lowest elude his power; he brings light and air to their rooms,—they detest light and air, and retreat. It was the present writer's fortune some little time since to visit a place well known as " Cat Court;" it was the resort of thieves and vagabonds of the worst descrip- tion, till the place became such a nuisance it was shut by autho- rity. The curate of the district, determined to try an experiment, purchased the court, with its dozen or so of cottages, had the entire place cleansed and whitewashed, and when we visited it, it was supplied with gas, baths, kitchens, reading and club-room, night school, and lending library, and the rooms all let to tramps at 3d. and 4d. a night. Through the influence of the manager, a most remarkable man, himself once a prize-fighter, many idle- vagabonds had been thoroughly reclaimed, and some are now occu- pying respectable positions in the world. But the class which originally occupied these lodging-houses has utterly disappeared ; they are untouched, they have hidden themselves in some lower depth, the ploughshare of civilization comes and ploughs them in, but neither alters nor exterminates them. If men like Ned Wright can reach this class, and have power only to touch them so far as to bring them into an attitude in which other influence is possible, their work is worth doing. We confess the whole manner of this revivalistic teaching is repugnant to us, seems as unlike as possible to the teaching of him who did not strive, or cry, or cause his voice to be heard in the streets. Yet we admit the power is of God which turns the thief into an evangelist, and makes the sometime robber pay out of scanty earnings the debts contracted in former days. But we prefer this man, the hero of this history, when he was earning this scanty salary ; we condemn altogether as a mistake his becoming subsistent with his wife and child on chance alms, or, as he would phrase it, " living by faith." Mr. Leach says he pursues his evangelistic labours incessantly, and never makes any appeal for the supply of his personal wants ; but this whole book is an appeal, and reminds us of the boy who, when told never again to ask his uncles for money, on the occasion of their next visit looked simply up and remarked, "John don't beg, but John's got no money." It would be far better, even
from a missionary point of view, that he should be able to say he was earning his bread by the work of his hands. Willingness for unexciting work is, to the class among which he labours, a terrible test of sincerity.
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