You come in,and you get a large pot of coffee,tea,or cocoa,and a hunk of bread.You can go into the wash-house,where you can have a wash with plenty of warm water,and soap and towels free.
Then after having washed and eaten you can make yourself comfortable.
You can write letters to your friends,if you have any friends to write to,or you can read,or you can sit quietly and do nothing.
At eight o'clock the Shelter is tolerably full,and then begins what we consider to be the indispensable feature of the whole concern.
Two or three hundred men in the men's Shelter,or as many women in the women's Shelter,are collected together,most of them strange to each other,in a large room.They are all wretchedly poor--what are you to do with them?This is what we do with them.
We hold a rousing Salvation meeting.The Officer in charge of the Depot,assisted by detachments from the Training Homes,conducts a jovial free-and-easy social evening.The girls have their banjos and their tambourines,and for a couple of hours you have as lively a meeting as you will find in London.There is prayer,short and to the point;there are addresses,some delivered by the leaders of the meeting,but the most of them the testimonies of those who have been saved at previous meetings,and who,rising in their seats,tell their companions their experiences.Strange experiences they often are of those who have been down in the very bottomless depths of sin and vice and misery,but who have found at last firm footing on which to stand,and who are,as they say in all sincerity,"as happy as the day is long."There is a joviality and a genuine good feeling at some of these meetings which is refreshing to the soul.There are all sorts and conditions of men;casuals,gaol birds,Out-of-Works,who have come there for the first time,and who find men who last week or last month were even as they themselves are now--still poor but rejoicing in a sense of brotherhood and a consciousness of their being no longer outcasts and forlorn in this wide world.There are men who have at last seen revive before them a hope of escaping from that dreadful vortex,into which their sins and misfortunes had drawn them,and being restored to those comforts that they had feared so long were gone for ever;nay,of rising to live a true and Godly life.These tell their mates how this has come about,and urge all who hear them to try for themselves and see whether it is not a good and happy thing to be soundly saved.In the intervals of testimony--and these testimonies,as every one will bear me witness who has ever attended any of our meetings,are not long,sanctimonious lackadaisical speeches,but simple confessions of individual experience--there are bursts of hearty melody.The conductor of the meeting will start up a verse or two of a hymn illustrative of the experiences mentioned by the last speaker,or one of the girls from the Training Home will sing a solo,accompanying herself on her instrument,while all join in a rattling and rollicking chorus.
There is no compulsion upon anyone of our dossers to take part in this meeting;they do not need to come in until it is over;but as a simple matter of fact they do come in.Any night between eight and ten o'clock you will find these people sitting there,listening to the exhortations and taking part in the singing,many of them,no doubt,unsympathetic enough,but nevertheless preferring to be present with the music and the warmth,mildly stirred,if only by curiosity,as the various testimonies are delivered.
Sometimes these testimonies are enough to rouse the most cynical of observers.We had at one of our shelters the captain of an ocean steamer,who had sunk to the depths of destitution through strong drink.He came in there one night utterly desperate and was taken in hand by our people--and with us taking in hand is no mere phrase,for at the close of our meetings our officers go from seat to seat,and if they see anyone who shows signs of being affected by the speeches or the singing,at once sit down beside him and begin to labour with him for the salvation of his soul.By this means they are able to get hold of the men and to know exactly where the difficulty lies,what the trouble is,and if they do nothing else,at least succeed in convincing them that there is someone who cares for their soul and would do what he could to lend them a helping hand.
The captain of whom I was speaking was got hold of in this way.
He was deeply impressed,and was induced to abandon once and for all his habits of intemperance.From that meeting he went an altered man.
He regained his position in the merchant service,and twelve months afterwards astonished us all by appearing in the uniform of a captain of a large ocean steamer,to testify to those who were there how low he had been,how utterly he had lost all hold on Society and all hope of the future,when,fortunately led to the Shelter,he found friends,counsel,and salvation,and from that time had never rested until he had regained the position which he had forfeited by his intemperance.
