gcls_WFP_968

Miss Muriel Lester.

We have messages and letters in our walls from some very wonderful people. One of these messages is from Miss Muriel Lester, of England.

Miss Lester wrote a message on a little leaflet about a Chineses youth. She wrote to the director of Camp Greenville: "I hear we are the same age. I wish I could see your boys but I can't. God be with you and them. Muriel Lester."

Miss Lester was born in a godly, religious home of wealth. She, her sister Doris, and her brother Kingsley were wonderful Christians. Miss Muriel Lester was well educated and travelled extensively.

In order to get to her home near London, the train in which Miss Lester travelled, passed through the poor section of the great city in Bow street.

Here squalor, poverty, drunkeness and criminality existed. Twelve people sometimes were compelled to live in one room. Of course, England has always had an overcrowded population. There are more people than jobs and England has tried to maintain an Empire over the world by force in order to have enough business to maintain a nation. In the United States, there has always been a surplus of land, food, and work. Depressions have occurred but peole did not starve. In the United States, it might be said that the slums of our big cities were caused, in the main, by human weakness and failure but in Europe thye were caused by a large extent by economic conditions and an overcrowded population. The poor in the United States today may be the rich of tomorrow but in overcrowded countries the opportunity for the poor to advance is small and the contrast between the rich and the poor is very great.

Miss Lester said that at interdenominational conferences the question was frequently discussed, "How to reach the Masses!" She said, "I heard it well discussed by many public speakers. But no one suggested the simple expedient of going to live with them."

She and her sister Doris decided to live in Bow street and to give their lives in helping the people of that destitute section. Miss Lester went to Cairo once and visited a training school for Mohammadan missionaries. Here she heard teh students taught, "Never deny that the teaching of Christ is noble, that His doctrine goes beyond the rules of life laid down for us by the Prophet. But point out sedulously that the laws Jesus Christ gave are never followed and never have been. His teaching is too high for human beings to act upon. That proves Him to have been a faulty leader, a foolish prophet. Stress the fact that Moslems can and do keep the laws of our religion."

The Lester sisters decided to try to actually live the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth in Bow street. Their brother Kingsley died and left a note which made a few gifts to friends and then leavin the rest of his money "to Muriel and Doris that the income from it may be used in their work among the people of bow or wherever else they may go."

Finally a home was purchased and Kingsley Hall became the headquarters for their work. One of their workers was Miss Mary Hughes, the daughter of Judge Hughes who wrote "Tom Brown's School Days." She quotes her father as saying, "He was always telling us that we were in God's lowest class because we had so much and so many people waited on us and served us. In service lies greatness."

The program of Kingsley Hall tackled every problem of relief. Religious services, of course, were held, but food, clothes, sickness, housing, wages, work, rents and every other need in Bow street was a part of the program of the Lester sisters. Miss Muriel said, "The business of the Church of Christ touches life at every point, and perhaps it is better not to join it than to come in imagining that one can have a day off whenever one likes. Peter used the right word when he described a Christian as the "slave" of Christ.---"