On Sunday, March 14, 1915, the Rev. John Mortimer Lydgate (1854-1922), the pastor of Lihu‘e Union Church and the namesake of Kaua‘i’s Lydgate Beach Park, delivered a heretofore virtually forgotten sermon to his congregation, which was composed of Lihu‘e’s elite.
On Sunday, March 14, 1915, the Rev. John Mortimer Lydgate (1854-1922), the pastor of Lihu‘e Union Church and the namesake of Kaua‘i’s Lydgate Beach Park, delivered a heretofore virtually forgotten sermon to his congregation, which was composed of Lihu‘e’s elite. Herewith are edited portions of that sermon.
“The condition of the laboring classes, sanitation, condition of life, morals. The victims of ignorance, and vice and crime. Children in our midst, on this island, damned to the world, with lives to live if not souls to save. We don’t want to hear about them. We don’t want to see them.
“But these are people in danger or distress — not people of refinement, culture, or wealth — but they are human beings like ourselves. Surely, if we listened with the keen ear of a sympathetic imagination, we could hear the pitiful cry of these helpless victims. It’s up to us to come to their help, because they are human beings.
“Where does disease come from? From the unsanitary, neglected underworld. We think that it is far away and we are safe. We think that if we can keep the moral plague far away, then it’s all right. Yet it doesn’t stay there. The lines of business and traffic and curiosity run back and forth and you can’t keep anything contagious anywhere very long. These sources of infection, physical and moral, are generally much nearer than we think. The upper crust of society is always just over the lower, and the distance down isn’t far.
“Now, I recognize the fact that this is emphatically a philanthropic community in no ways deaf to the cry when they hear it, and already carrying on large burdens of this kind.
“I would most heartily commend this generous and efficient philanthropy and would bid you God speed.”
