On 28 February 1873, vast crowds poured into Edinburgh to pay their respects to one of Scotland’s beloved pastors. An elderly man on the funeral route was heard to say, “he was a father unto us in very truth. Men may come and men may go, but it will be long before we get the like of Thomas Guthrie again.” Guthrie was born in Brechin, studied chemistry and theology at the University of Edinburgh, and went on to become one of Britain’s leading and much-beloved social reformers. After being a pastor of a rural parish in Arbirlot in Angus for seven years (1830-1837), he received the call to become an assistant minister to John Sym in the Old Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh.
Right from the beginning we hear his heartbeat for the poor in the Parish of Greyfriars. It is hard for us to imagine what it was like in the Edinburgh slums of that time. What better person than Guthrie to tell us in his own expressive and emotive style:
“I wandered in those houses for whole days without ever seeing a Bible, or indeed any book at all. I often stood in rooms bare of any furniture; where father, mother, and half a dozen children had neither bed nor bedding, unless a heap of straw and dirty rags huddled in a corner could be called so. I have heard the wail of children crying for bread, and their mother had none to give them. I have seen a babe pulling breasts as dry as if the starved-looking mother had been dead. I have known a father turn his step-daughter to the street at night – bidding the sobbing girl who bloomed into womanhood, earn her bread there as others were doing. I have bent over the foul pallet of a dying lad to hear him whisper how his father and mother – who were sitting half drunk by the fireside had pulled blankets off his body to sell them for drink. I have seen children blanched like plants growing in a cellar – for weeks they never breathed a mouthful of fresh air for want of rags to cover their nakedness; and I used often to observe in these dingy dwellings, where the air is poison, and the food is scanty, and the cold is bitter, and short is the gleam of sunshine, and they live in continual terror of a drunken father or mother, and where when they cry they are not kissed but beaten, that the children have an air of sadness, and look as if they never smiled. I don’t recollect of ever seeing a mother in these wretched dwellings dandling her infant, or of hearing the little creature crow or laugh as he leapt with joy. There, infants have no toys; and mothers’ smiles are rare as sunshine. Nobody can know the misery I suffered amid those scenes of human wretchedness, woe, want, and sin.”
For Guthrie healing the plight of the poor seemed like scaling a towering mountain with sheer rock faces, and many would have turned back at the knowledge of the real condition he knew so well, a condition that was hidden from most of the people in the city. And yet he steeled himself for the task of transformation through God’s help. He could have fled to the security of the suburbs, but he held firm to his deep conviction that “if a man won’t live among the scum of the Cowgate, I would at once say to him ‘you can’t be its minister.’’’
The first thing that Guthrie realised was that many of the poor did not come to church because they could not afford the pew tokens. This was due to an old custom that money for the church’s upkeep was raised in this way. Realising that he could not overcome the church token custom in Greyfriars Kirk, Guthrie gained permission to use Magdalen Chapel – the chapel famed for the reformers and Covenanters – and set up a church service for the poor who could not afford to buy tokens. Although the stench of the bodies in that place would drive the well-to-do away, for Guthrie it was a slice of heaven. But he soon realised that this small chapel could not contain the crowds that started coming. Something had to be done.
In 1840 St John’s on Victoria St was erected with money sacrificially raised by many, and the crowds poured in. The gallery was let to people of the city who could easily afford it, but the main floor was open free of charge to 650, thus allowing many of the poor that Guthrie had befriended to join the church. When the Disruption broke out in 1843 over the patronage system, most of the evangelicals left the Church of Scotland to form the Free Church, which meant that Guthrie lost this building. By 1845 Free St John’s (today’s St Columba’s Free Church) had been built opposite his old church, so he resumed his work there.
The fruit of the Ragged Schools he pioneered for street children spoke for itself, as Guthrie pointed out in 1859:
“I. The results our Schools are to be found in many happy homes, the abodes of those that, once wretched, ragged outcasts, are now honest men and virtuous mothers, useful citizens and heads of families… We – and in these results I include the influence of other, though smaller schools, have cleared the streets of Edinburgh of juvenile beggars, – a feat that the Magistrates and Police, with cells and prison at their back, were far from ever being able to achieve, that when our School was set on foot, their name was Legion. They swarmed through all the town – it was creeping with them.
II. We are fast emptying the prisons…
III. The Original Ragged School [founded in 1847] alone has rescued from great misery and certain ruin not less than five hundred children. They are now blessings to society… And if we make the much more probable supposition, that but for our school – its useful, kind, and holy training – two-thirds of those five hundred children would have developed into full-blown criminals, we have saved the country not less than 72,000 [about £9.8 million in today’s money]!”
“Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy” (Proverbs 31:8-9, NIV).
Image: Statue of Thomas Guthrie, by F.W. Pomeroy, Princes Gardens, Edinburgh, Wikipedia Commons.