II - THE MASTER'S REPORT (1879)

Summary

1. In calling the members of the St. George's Guild to their first ecclesia, their Master cannot but condole with them on the smallness of their numbers; nor would he at all desire them to take either pride or comfort in any sacred texts, or accepted aphorisms, concerning the value of little flocks, and efficiency of resolute phalanxes. He takes much blame to himself for want of clearness in exposition of the work to be done; and he confesses not a little discouragement to himself in perceiving, even in cases where he has made the nature of it intelligible, how very unwilling most people are to have any hand in it.

2. The radical cause of this general resistance to St. George's effort is the doctrine, preached for the last fifty years as the true Gospel of the Kingdom, that you serve your neighbour best by letting him alone; except in the one particular of endeavouring to cheat him out of his money. But the hurrahing and flinging up of caps, which, throughout beatified Europe, have hitherto attended the promulgation of this method of temporal and eternal salvation, are, it seems to me, beginning slightly to abate, in the presence of such unpleasant commercial incidents as the stoppage of the Glasgow Bank (of which a man of large social experience wrote to me that no such distress had fallen on Scotland since Flodden Field); and of the social discomforts—not to say distresses—which are beginning to manifest themselves as results of plethoric wealth in England, and military triumph in Germany.