Personally Involved in Misery . . . Why?

The Answer Lies in One Word--Duty

We have been reading Georgina Battiscombe's biography of the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury.  It is insightful and instructive.  For anyone wanting to come to grips with the Victorian period it ought to be considered an essential read.    

It is a skillful account, insofar as Battiscombe gives us a "warts and all" rendition.  We have often made mention of God being pleased to strike straight blows with crooked sticks--and this case is no exception.  Shaftesbury was actually Anthony Ashley-Cooper and became the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury on the death of his father.  He spent his entire adult life labouring on behalf of those who were sorely afflicted.  Whilst he had a sterling career, firstly in the Commons, then in the House of Lords, it was not one removed from those he was seeking to help.  He was driven by a genuine human compassion--and aided therein by the faithful help of his wife, Minnie.

Here is an excerpt at the beginning of Battiscombe's biography which gives us a measure of the man.  Ashley-Cooper had been made one of fifteen commissioners charged with the licensing and inspection of mental asylums:

Among these commissioners was Ashley, who thus began fifty-seven years of unrewarded, disagreeable, and very fatiguing work on behalf of those whom he once described  as "the most helpless, if not the most afflicted portion, of the human race."

It was not work likely to appeal to a politically ambitious young man like Ashley.  Familiarity with the working of lunatic asylums or with the intricacies of lunacy law could lead to no office or to any sort of political employment.  He admitted to feeling "unusual sympathy" with the mentally afflicted, but otherwise he had no reason to interest himself particularly in their plight.  Why then did he undertake so thankless a task and, what is still more surprising, pursue it for so long and with such unwavering tenacity?  The answer lies in one short and simple word, "duty."  He had not sought out the work himself; the work had, as it were, sought him.  It was a duty to which he believed himself called by God.

On one Sunday, when for once he broke the Sabbath rule to which he usually adhered so strictly, finding himself from "eleven o'clock til half-past six engaged in the good but wearisome cause of lunatic asylums," he commented, "did not wish for such an employment but duty made it imperative."  So he might have written about all his work on behalf of lunatics.

But what began as a duty ended as a matter of the heart.  Once he had seen for himself the neglect and brutality endured by these helpless people he found himself personally involved in their misery: a sensitive and compassionate man, he could not see such suffering and pass by on the other side.  Where the welfare of lunatics was concerned Ashley acted simply in the spirit of the Good Samaritan and continued so to act until almost the last day of his long life.  [Georgina Battiscombe, Shaftesbury: The Great Reformer 1801--1885 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1975),  p.38.]

The conditions in which so many of the inmates of the mental asylums existed horrified Ashley--as they would most fellow humans.  But Ashley insisted on seeing it "up close and personal" as they say.  He walked through the stench and the filth and the human desperation.  He actually stopped and talked with those whom he met--about their life history, how they got to end up in a lunatic asylum, and what their living conditions were actually like.   And he felt compassion for them.  Therein one cannot help but see the imprint of the Saviour of the world. 

There were no votes in this.  There was no career enhancement.  Actually, it was the reverse.

Thank God for such gifts to His Church.  May He grant thousands more.