Church and People in an Industrial City, by E.R. Wickham, B.D.

[p032] J.C. Mission to Sheffield Church and People in an Industrial City, by E. R. Wickham, B.D. (Lutterworth Press, 30s.) ‘GOD deliver us from a Church religiously determined to engage the world, without the intellectual capacity to speak intelligently to its real problems!’ (p. 257) Tt is in the spirit conveyed in these words that the Rev. E. R. Wickham, known in Sheffield as the Industrial Parson, has approached his work; and one must credit him with real determination to grapple with what he describes in the Intro- duction as ‘the intractable and chronic nature of the mission- ary problem facing the Church in our modern society’. Having undertaken the task of evangelizing the workers of the great industries of Sheffield, Mr Wickham had to decide on making an historical-economic analysis of ‘the estrange- ment of the population in general and of the working class in particular’ from the Church. He has, in essence, arrived at the root of the problem. In the process he has uncovered a surprising amount of the local history of Sheffield. It could be the history of almost any great industrial community. It certainly makes one proud of the working class of one’s native city. In 1792 a certain Colonel de Lancey visited Sheffield. This gentleman was Deputy Adjutant General to the Secretary for War, and his views on the French Revolution were somewhat different from those of Sheffield people: ‘At Sheffield .. . I found that the seditious doctrines of Paine and the factious people who are endeavouring to disturb the peace of the country had extended to a degree very much beyond my conception. . .’ A local newspaper of 1793 asserts: ‘Sheffield is stigmatized as being a seat of ignorance and disloyalty.’ Samuel Roberts, a famous Sheffield silversmith, a social reformer, and Con- servative in political views, writes in his autobiography that ‘to many, even professed ministers of the Gospel, it [Tom Paine’s ‘Rights of Man’] appeared to become dearer than the Bible, and their visits to their flocks were made with the “Rights of Man” in their pockets, to induce them to read it’ Mr Wickham has stumbled on the class struggle, but un- fortunately the facts he has learned are in conflict with his fundamental beliefs. He traces the ‘estrangement’, from the English Revolution of 1640, through the struggies of religious workers with the fee-paying pew holders, and even shows how the Chartists were held out of Sheffield Cathedral by ‘police . . . at the Church gates with cutlasses, and only “decently dressed individuals” were allowed to pass’! Engels is quoted as writing in his ‘Condition of the Working Classes in England in 1844 that ‘among the masses there prevails almost universally a total indifference to religion’. One cannot help but think that the truth of this dictum in 1957 is precisely the reason for the work of Mr Wickham, and indeed for the writing of this sincere and well documen- ted survey. Conversations with various working men in the Sheffield factories seem to indicate that, despite all the sincerity and hard work of Mr Wickham and his associates, the results will be similar to those of the Worker-Priests in France, and that in 2044 Engels’ dictum—for the reasons he and Marx gave—will be truer than ever. HENRY MARTIN King and Commons