We have, in our Slum Cities, manufactured a Poverty which, instead of bracing and disciplining our manhood into higher service, tends only to maim an… - Henry Scott Holland

Poverty ... allows them no room to breathe, to grow, to expand. It gives no time for spiritual interests. It chokes back the religious instincts. It offers no opportunities for the play of the higher energies. They are too tired to think, or to read, or to pray.

Here are poor who, far from discovering their true selves through the pressure of their poverty, find in it a cloud which for ever hides them from themselves.

Do we suppose Jesus Christ laid His blessing on this unholy poverty? Do we really imagine that this is what He had in His eye, as He pronounced the benediction? Nay! This is the Poverty which blights and curses. This is the Poverty which God hates. This is the Poverty which is an outrage on man, and an insult to God. Far from accepting it as a preparation for the Kingdom of Heaven, we have, in the name of that Kingdom, to demand that it be swept off the face of the earth and be never again seen.