My sister trimmed 70 or 80 hats every spring for several years with the contents of friends’ rubbish drawers, thus relieving dozens of poor mothers who liked their children to ‘go tidy on Sunday,’ and also keeping down finery in her Sunday school. Those who literally fulfilled her request for ‘rubbish’ used to marvel at the results.
Little scraps of carpet, torn old curtains, faded blinds, and all such gear, go a wonderfully long way towards making poor cottagers and old or sick people comfortable. I never saw anything in this ‘rubbish’ line yet that could not be turned to good account somehow, with a little considering of the poor and their discomforts.
I wish my lady reader would just leave this book now, and go straight up-stairs and have a good rummage at once, and see what can be thus cleared out. If she does not know the right recipients at first hand, let her send it off to the nearest working clergyman’s wife, and see how gratefully it will be received! For it is a great trial to workers among the poor not to be able to supply the needs they see. Such supplies are far more useful than treble their small money value.
Just a word of earnest pleading for needs, closely veiled, but very sore, which might be wonderfully lightened if this wardrobe over-hauling were systematic and faithful. There are hundreds of poor clergymen’s families to whom a few old garments or any household oddments are as great a charity as to any of the poor under their charge. There are two Societies for aiding these with such gifts, under initials which are explained in the Reports; the P.P.C. Society—Secretary, Miss Breay, Battenhall Place, Worcester; and the A.F.D. Society—Secretary, Miss Hinton, 4 York Place, Clifton. I only ask my lady friends to send for a report to either of these devoted secretaries; and if their hearts are not so touched by the cases of brave and bitter need that they go forthwith to wardrobes and drawers to see what can be spared and sent, they are colder and harder than I give Englishwomen credit for.
There is no bondage in consecration. The two things are opposites, and cannot co-exist, much less mingle. We should suspect our consecration, and come afresh to our great Counsellor about it, directly we have any sense of bondage. As long as we have an unacknowledged feeling of fidget about our account-book, and a smothered wondering what and how much we ‘ought’ to give, and a hushed-up wishing the thing had not been put quite so strongly before us, depend upon it we have not said unreservedly, ‘Take my silver and my gold.’ And how can the Lord keep what He has not been sincerely asked to take?
Ah! if we had stood at the foot of the Cross, and watched the tremendous payment of our redemption with the precious blood of Christ,—if we had seen that awful price told out, drop by drop, from His own dear patient brow and torn hands and feet, till it was ALL paid, and the central word of eternity was uttered, ‘It is finished!’ should we not have been ready to say, ‘Not a mite will I withhold!’
My Jewels.
‘Shall I hold them back—my jewels?
Time has travelled many a day
Since I laid them by for ever,