young, but in his case it appeared to be domestic service; not as I had seen just before I had met him, a child of that age actually employed in the fields. He was a little fair-haired boy, and came running to the side of the field to ask the time. He told me that he had to work from six in the morning until six in the evening, with an hour at twelve o'clock for his dinner. His job just then was pulling up a red weed in the corn. He had worked for three summers, and only went to school in the winter. I parted with him and his three little sisters at the gate of their father's cottage, where they had all come to welcome him home to his dinner—not of meat, but of gooseberry pie.
There are doubtless many parishes in England in which no voice is ever raised against the cruel wrong done to a young child in thus making him work eleven hours a day. But where a voice is raised to rebuke the parents who sell their children into slavery, and the farmers who buy their labour, whose voice is it? Whose is the counter influence, the only counter influence that can come with any weight against parental influence, against the exigencies of the sole employer, the exigencies of stern want? Only his who can claim them for God, who can remind parents and employers that these children have minds and souls which have a right to knowledge and education,—the much-abused parson!
Not that the best among them does more than he ought, or in many cases is half enough that champion of the poor which his high office calls him to be. For a clergyman's office is exactly that of Mr Greatheart in "The Pilgrim's Progress." He is especially appointed to be the defender of the women and children of his charge, and of all the Fearings and Feebleminds among the men; to struggle in their cause with the terrible giants which seek their destruction—Grim (want), Maul the oppressor (social custom) and Despair, the most cruel of all, who drives to drink and ruin those whom Grim and Maul have already half killed.
May we live to see the day when a true priesthood in England, emancipated themselves from the thraldom of Grim, Maul, and Despair, shall rise to their true calling, and become the defenders of the poor, and the oppressed, and the suffering in every class against their foes!
