The Earl Who Went Down Into the Mines

In 1838, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, descended into the coal mines of Yorkshire. What he found there broke him. Children as young as five crawled on hands and knees through tunnels too narrow for adults, dragging coal carts chained to their waists. Girls of eight hauled loads in total darkness for fourteen hours a day. Their backs were scarred, their lungs blackened, their childhood erased.

Shaftesbury was an earl — a man of title, wealth, and parliamentary privilege. He could have stayed in his London parlor. Instead, he brought the testimony of those children to the floor of Parliament, complete with illustrations so disturbing that members wept openly. The mine owners called him a radical. His own party questioned his judgment. But Shaftesbury pressed forward, and the Mines Act of 1842 passed, banning children under ten and all women from underground labor.

He did not stop there. For the next forty years he championed chimney sweeps, factory children, the mentally ill, and the homeless — anyone society had decided was expendable. When he died in 1885, the streets of London were lined with the poor he had defended, weeping for the nobleman who had seen their blood as precious.

This is the vision the psalmist holds before us. The righteous ruler of Psalm 72 does not merely tolerate the vulnerable — he delivers the needy who cry out, rescues them from oppression and violence, because precious is their blood in his sight. True authority always bends toward the forgotten.