DR. PARKER ON THE MURDERS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9220, 24 November 1888, Page 2 (Supplement)

DR. PARKER ON THE MURDERS.

At the close of his morning service in the City Temple lately Dr. Parker referred at length to the East End murders. Replying to the question how far the pulpit was responsible for such crimes, the rev. gentleman said the pulpit had undertaken lnstrutally to convert society, and the pulpit had signally failed. Always allowing for exceptions, the pulpit was the paid slave of respectable society. The pulpit loved respectability—the pulpit boasted of respectable, intelligent congregations. The pulpit had lost its hold on the tragic and impetuous life of the world. The outcasts of society turned away from the preacher as from a man who talked in an unknown tongue, and troubled himself about antiquities and metaphysics for which the sad and maddened heart of the world cared nothing. Men were wanted who knew the country they lived in, the sorrows which surged in billows around their very homes, the poverty that was completed by hopelessness, and the mental unrest which could not be touched by dead fathers or living pedagogues. Every pulpit in the world should denounce the crimes which London mourned ; denunication was a poor part of pulpit duty—every congregation should offer a reward for the discovery of the criminal. What the Home Secretary was doing or thinking of doing passed his (Dr. Parker's) comprehension. If offering a reward for the discovery of the criminal did not. detect the perpetrator of the crime, what harm was done'! But if offering a reward should end in the detection of the criminal, great good would bo done. This quick murder of women, however, was nothing compared to the slow murder that was going on every day. Compared with many who were cruel deliberately, the perpetration of those East End crimes was gentleness —mercy itself. The magistrates should be armed with great powers. Nothing would really make a certain class of criminals feel their crime but bodily chastisement. It was no use trying moral suasion upon garotters, violent robbers, cruel husbands and fathers ; they must be flogged. A creature in Wiltshire recently felled his lhdpless wife, kicked her, used her infamously. She fled for refuge under the bed ; lie dragged her out, tore every rag from her body, made her walk in nakedness before her children for two hours, dragged her round the room by the hair of her head, until the poor maddened creature Hew through the window. And the husband was sentenced to three months' imprisonment! '"Shame!") Church Congress and Nonconformist assemblies should suspend their sittings that these tremendous grievances might be attended to. They had had papers enough upon distant subjects, addresses enough upon things that were only in the air. What, were they to do with the real concrete intolerable life immediately around them ? It was in vain to meet as quiet, respectable, gospel-imbibing congregations, drinking orthodoxy to the full, and setting down the empty goblet with a sigh of impious satisfaction. The devil laughed at the sacrifice. As to denouncing the criminal, better ask how far they were responsible for his creation, by making labour a disappointment, by running profits down so small as to turn young men to gambling, by surrounding men with drinkeries and then fining them for drinking. Away with the piety that trifled with the stream when it might dry up the fountain !