Chapter 60: The Revival of Colportage
Chapter 60.
The Revival of Colportage
Need of the Work—Character of the Men—The Work in Scotland—Mr. W. Corden Jones's Reminiscences—Lord Shaftesbury—Luther's Inkpot.
In connection with the work at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, the year 1866 was remarkable for being the period in which the service of the colporteur as an itinerant bookseller was revived in England. When he fully realised the importance of such an effort, Mr. Spurgeon wondered that it had not been revived before; and when a number of men were actually placed in their districts, he was surprised that greater interest was not shown in the work by the Christian public. The colporteur was so far from being a new character on the scenes that he was merely a copy of the agent who in the days of the Reformation carried about, with other wares, the evangelical publications which, by enlightening their readers, helped on the great movement. Colportage was then, in some measure, a service of danger; but now, to Mr. Spurgeon and his friends, it promised to supply a missing link in the work of rural evangelisation. A few persons saw what great possibilities were within reach, and were correspondingly enthusiastic in their advocacy of the enterprise; but the association at first made only slow progress. Colporteur and colportage were words which had a strange sound in English ears, and they were not readily understood. It was also soon found to be a mistake to suppose that such work could be self-supporting. On the average, every colporteur employed represents an outlay of £40 a year, which has to be made up by subscriptions. The men whom Mr. Spurgeon sought to bring together for this service were usually of the better working-class standard, although I have known a man with a college degree to be in the ranks. Besides being of good Christian character, each man needed to be sufficiently strong in a physical sense to bear the strain of carrying a heavy pack from village to village. Then, in addition to his bookselling, the colporteur was expected to be an all-round friend of the common people to the extent of his ability. As a rule, each man gave full satisfaction to his employers in this respect. The books were sold, the cottagers were visited, the sick received attention, and at many Sunday and week-night services the colporteur was the minister. The work was entirely undenominational, in strict accordance with the interpretation Mr. Spurgeon put upon that term. It is true that there is a so-called undenominationalism which will hardly allow the agents employed to call their souls their own; at all events, they are denied that liberty of free speech which is, or ought to be, every Englishman's birthright. With Mr. Spurgeon it was quite otherwise. Men of all evangelical denominations were welcomed into the Colportage Society, and each man was expected to be outspoken and to do the best he could for his own body. The Wesleyan worked as such, and so also did the Baptist, the Churchman, or the Congregationalist. What more effective method could have been devised for promoting brotherly love?
Colportage had really been commenced in Scotland about ten years previously, and in 1866 the Northern society had about 150 colporteurs at work. The experiment in Scotland was at once a great success, and by way of showing what could be effected in one rural district the Committee said:—
"About seven years ago a colporteur was started in an agricultural district in the South of Scotland, with instructions to visit only the villages, hamlets, and separate dwellings, and to leave unvisited a populous town within it. When he began his labours he found that the people read little except newspapers and frivolous or pernicious publications, and that they had so little interest in literature, or desire for it, that it was often with difficulty they were persuaded even to look at the publications which he carried with him. But it was not long till a favourable change took place. Cheap and attractive periodicals found their way gradually into many families, the number of subscribers increased from year to year, till they have reached the vast amount given below: a result which bears the highest testimony to the power and value of the aggressive principle adopted by this and other agents of the society." The sale of magazines and numbers soon averaged 1,600 monthly in this parish alone; and it was therefore added:—
"Who can adequately estimate the amount of wholesome influence which these publications must be exercising from month to month over the minds and hearts of this people? And there is every reason to believe that, with few exceptions, the subscribers would have been without them still had they not been carried into their dwellings.
"This, however, is only a small portion of the literature sold by the colporteur. A growing interest in religious books has been awakened throughout the district, and of these the annual sale is now very large, including between three and four hundred Bibles and Testaments.
"And let it be remembered that the society's agents are no mere book-hawkers, but pious men, who know and love the truth, who commend it by their lips as well as by the publications sold by them, and who feel it to be their privilege, and make it their endeavour, to introduce the Gospel message into all the families in their districts. They distribute tracts, read and pray with the sick, aged, and dying, hold prayer-meetings, and are most valuable auxiliaries to ministers, missionaries, and all who are seeking to extend the Redeemer's kingdom."
Even in Ireland the work proved so successful that in one year the colporteurs sold 64,136 Bibles and books and 367,752 periodicals. It was, no doubt, through noticing these results achieved in the more remote parts of the United Kingdom that Mr. Spurgeon was prompted to take action, and to found an association in connection with the Metropolitan Tabernacle.
Mr. W. Corden Jones, who in his early days was associated with Spurgeon's old friend, Richard Knill, of Chester, supplies the following particulars about this agency:—"I send you a few particulars concerning my personal connection with the Colportage Association and the late beloved President.
"After several years of evangelistic service I was admitted to the Pastors' College as a student, and formed one of the comparatively small band who, in its earlier years, first linked hands in the formation of the Pastors' College Association. Well do I remember him saying on that occasion, as we looked upon his manly, vigorous form: 'Some of you will remain until you see the hairs on this head turn grey, and will perhaps say, as you see me toddling along, "There goes old Spurgeon."' Would that his honoured figure had been spared to toddle among us for many a year to come!
"Mr. Spurgeon baptised me in the Metropolitan Tabernacle. Never shall I forget, while standing on the steps of the baptistery, his solemn exhortation to be a faithful preacher of the Gospel of Christ.
"During one of those inconvenient intervals in the pastorate to which so many ministers are liable, I was invited by the Committee of the Metropolitan Tabernacle Colportage Association to the secretariat. Of course, before accepting the office I first saw Mr. Spurgeon. He received me very kindly, and said, 'Jones, I should prefer to see you continue fully engaged in the work of the ministry; but try the colportage, and if you do not like it I will find you a church.' Accordingly I entered upon the work January 1, 1873, and have thus for over twenty years continued in it, preaching on Sundays as opportunity offered.
"When I entered the Association it was in its infancy, only ten colporteurs being employed, and these supported with great difficulty. Although a novice in the technicalities of colportage, I had received the advantages of a thorough business training. I also fully realised the great need for the work, knowing full well the immense quantity of trashy, impure, and infidel literature circulated with baneful effect throughout the land. To counteract this by taking to the people good, sound, moral and Gospel books and periodicals, presented for sale by Christian men, I saw to be a grand home missionary enterprise. Accordingly, I devoted myself to the work in hand, and sought to make it known as widely as possible.
"For a time Mr. Spurgeon seemed to feel the society a burden to him, and would say, 'It is one child too many for me; I wish someone would take it off my hands.' However, I was not discouraged; the number of colporteurs increased from year to year until now nearly one hundred are employed. This greatly cheered the President, and when a well-known gentleman offered to take the Association off his hands, Mr. Spurgeon said, 'No, you go your way and we will continue ours; there is room enough for both.' And so it has proved.
"The Association has been eminently successful in spreading the Word of God and good literature, visiting the afflicted and aged, and conducting Gospel services in the open air, cottage meetings, etc. During the year 1891 the value of the sales reached £11,255 0s. 6d., and from the beginning £153,784 3s. 6d., many millions of publications being thus scattered broadcast as good seed. The President rarely interposed in any details of the work, but if any special need arose as to funds (which was not infrequent), he would say to me, 'You go on with the work, I'll find the money.' This he did nobly to the end, besides contributing generously from his own purse. On the occasion of his jubilee, when a large sum was presented to him, earnest representations were made to induce him to appropriate the whole to his own use. In replying, he told the friends that he wished to divide it among his various institutions, and said, 'I wish to give £200 to the Colportage Association,' which he did.
"Mr. Spurgeon was much pleased with the extent and value of the work, and said repeatedly from the platform of the Tabernacle that it was second to none of his institutions in value and utility.
"Alas! in the zenith of its prosperity he was taken to his rest and reward; but the work and the workers remain. Surely, apart from the immense amount of good accomplished and the intrinsic merit of the work being done throughout the country, no stronger appeal than the memory of the beloved founder can be made to friends to contribute the necessary funds to maintain and extend the Colportage Association. At least £1,000 a year is required, besides the sums contributed by districts, to retain the present staff of colporteurs. The total expenditure annually is about £7,000." On the whole, the Colportage Association has probably succeeded in a greater degree than the founders could have anticipated at the outset; for there are now about ninety men in as many districts in England and Wales. Bibles and wholesome books and periodicals, of the value of about £11,000 a year, are distributed, and people are gradually awaking to perceive the value of the work. As the late Lord Shaftesbury said ten years ago, "The records of the system in many parts of the Continent, in various districts of England and Ireland, but especially in Scotland, prove that we have long passed the period of trial and experiment, and that we have entered on a career of certain and great success." The aim of the Colportage Association was not only to enlighten the people by giving them what was elevating: a great deal needed to be done in the way of counteraction. As the great philanthropist just referred to added: "The infidel and immoral agencies of all kinds would, but for movements like these, have the field all to themselves; and few, except those who have been forced into an investigation of what is said, done, and written by the circulators of impure and seductive literature, can form an estimate of the number and variety of their efforts, and of the zeal and subtlety in which they are conceived and executed."
Probably Lord Shaftesbury knew more about the havoc caused by impure literature than Mr. Spurgeon, but no leader could have more highly valued a band of humble agents, who were proud to own him as their Chief, than the pastor of the Metropolitan Tabernacle valued his colporteurs. Again and again, on the occasion of the annual meeting in May, have I sat near the pastor to take notice of the eager interest with which he followed the unadorned stories of service told by the men fresh from their country spheres. They spoke in an uneducated way, but their anecdotes of adventures, which could never have happened to men not in earnest, were always greatly relished, not only by Mr. Spurgeon himself, but by the entire audience. It was on one of these occasions that the services of the late Dr. Samuel Manning, of the Religious Tract Society, were enlisted, when the doctor referred to the mark on the wall in one of the rooms of the Wartburg, said to have been made by Luther when he threw his inkpot at the head of the devil. "There is nothing so likely to make the devil flee as a good, well-administered pot of printers' ink," said Dr. Manning. "Depend upon it, it is more powerful to exorcise the devil than all the holy water that ever has been sprinkled by priests from the beginning of the great apostasy to the present time. This is precisely what this Colportage Society is doing all day long, and every day all the year round—throwing pots of printers' ink, which has been put upon paper, at the person of the arch-enemy."