Let every Home Missionary woman, to whom this land is dear, who cherishes father, husband, son or brother, who clings to loved home and precious children, use all her influence to bring in the day when the Christ standard shall be the standard for all our national and international relations.
O bells, to-day let warfare cease!
Christ came to be a Prince of Peace.
No longer let the sound of drum
Or trumpet, campward calling, come
To vex the earth with dread, and make
The hearts of wives and mothers ache.
Leave battle flags to moths and dust—
Let sword and gun grow red with rust!
Earth groaned with carnage—let it cease—
Ring in the thousand years of Peace!
Ring out the littleness of things,
Ring in the broader thought that brings
Swift end to all ignoble creeds.
Ring in an age of noble deeds
For all things pure, and high, and good—
The era of true brotherhood.
Ring out the lust for gold and gain—
The greed that cripples soul and brain,
And open eyes, long blind, to see
What grander, better things there be!
[Footnote: Eben Rexford.]
Home Missions is one of the greatest contributors to national righteousness. Through it the higher life of the community is developed in the formative period; through it belated peoples receive the spiritual transforming dynamic that makes them reach up to the higher and better in their surroundings and gives them a developing effectiveness and efficiency.
It brings the same force with greater power into the lives of the children, giving them also a training of minds and hands that equips them for an enlarging sphere of usefulness.
It brings the most telling force possible to the upward struggle of our primitive and dependent people, patiently leading them by the road of sympathetic understanding into some strength to stand amidst the overpowering complexity of the civilization that surrounds them, in which they as yet are not advanced enough to become more than a problem.
The Negro and Indian testify to the marvelous transforming power of the Gospel of Christ brought by Home Missions—a power that gives moral fiber, a wholesome attitude of life in which work and ambition have place.
To all that is noblest, highest and best in our national life, Home
Missions has given in large measure.
Home Missions faces forward, realizing that infinitely greater responsibility and service must now enter into the mission of the church at home, if this country is to remain Christian itself and be a force for Christianity in the world.