“Meanwhile the proper method with the Jeffs and the Sues is so simple and plain, so patently economical in this generation, and so tremendously profitable for the next, that its very simplicity makes it neglected. The colony at Templeton, Mass.; the one just organized at Menantico, N. J.; the farm colonies at Fort Wayne, Ind.; Lincoln, Ill.; Faribault, Minn.; Columbus, Ohio; and Letchworth Village, N. Y., all point the way with greater or less success.
“Yet Letchworth Village was enacted by the legislature of New York nearly five years ago. Its first commission reported 29,000 suitable inmates pressing for care. To-day it has only 100 inmates; and the Inter-church Federation says nothing.
“It is not worth while to get all stirred up and excited about Jeffs in North Carolina. What have we to say about the defectives in jails, workhouses, penitentiaries, reformatories, and prisons under our noses in New York? Is our beam so big that we cannot see it?”—Alexander Johnson, Director Department of Extension, Vineland, N. J.
Now, that was the churches' opportunity. Federation work should see that a religious school should be started in each community for its Jeffs and Sues. A city rescue mission could easily find work for Jeff.
I saw a Jeff come into the Sunday school of my own church. He was a great lumbering chap of eighteen years of age, he was not quite clean, there was the odor of the unwashed about him. He immediately went to the class of about thirty young men of his own age. I was gratified to see that youth seek the society of the church people rather than the saloon, but he was not welcome with the young men. The teacher visited his home, there was no help to be expected from the home, so the teacher, or the class, whether by actual request or by treatment, caused Jeff to stay away. Now, in the great day of accounts, of whom will that soul be required? If the defective intellect, what there is of it, can be turned to believe God, the defective is prevented from becoming a criminal. We have them at the Gospel Mission. The very first thing is to have the physician talk to Jeff of the sacredness of his own body to absolutely prevent all secret habits which injure the body and brain, and the motive of self-restraint both for physical habits and for drink must be that these things offend a loving Saviour who walks with each one of us.
Each year I meet Dr. H. M. Freas, of Philadelphia, at Northfield. His work as a physician frequently takes him to the asylum for the insane. He feels most keenly that these institutions should be in the hands of Christian people only. Many a brilliant intellect could be restored to perfect sanity if the loving care of some saintly Protestant sisterhood or brotherhood were in charge to bring the human love, which even the sanest of us need, to bear on the tottering brain. These human deficients are found in the public schools; as soon as discovered they should be transferred to a religious school where they can be scientifically studied, what intellect they have developed, and the religious side of each one fostered. If then they are found permanently deficient, especially in the moral sense, or in physical self-control, then they should be segregated on farms for the sake of the race. People of deficient brains become fanatics; now, if these unbalanced people become filled with an enthusiasm of righteousness they absolutely do much good. They constitute three-fourths of the street preachers, and they reach many a soul who never enters a church. Religion prevents insanity. There is no doubt that fanaticism run riot leads to the asylum. We had one man who was insufficiently fed, badly clothed, who spent the entire night in prayer, two or three nights of the week. Of course, he was brought up in the insane asylum, but when he had food enough at the asylum where he was not permitted to pray aloud, he soon became normal, and was set free. It taught him a needed lesson.
But religion sustains us through the breaking ties of life, through the loss of fortune, through the defection of friends, through blasted hopes, through the anguish of children going wrong, and their punishment by the State which follows.
Religion holds many a woman whose son is a wanderer, either criminal or otherwise, from insanity. I know a woman who has not looked into the face of her wandering son for six years. She stands up and sings with radiant face, “I am going through whatever others do, I am going through with Jesus,” and in spite of what looks an unbearable sorrow, leads a useful and apparently happy life. A mission is a blessed thing for enthusiasts. It sends them with flowers and literature to hospitals and jails, it sends food to private families in need, it gives the enthusiasts tracts to distribute, it puts musical instruments into their hands and says, “Praise the Lord with pleasant sounds,” it sets women to repairing clothing for the poor, to caring for little children, while mothers earn money for food. As we do these things we talk religion, we tell of Jesus, the friend of sinners, we make a steady effort in very many directions to have each soul brought into harmony with God. In almost every instance where sorrow in a family has been the result of sin; and Jesus is allowed to become to each of them a personal Saviour; the home is electrified by a new enthusiasm; the parents become efficient, self-supporting, happy; the children become self-respecting; are taken from the class needing help; and become helpers. Religion eases the burden of life and heals the welts of adversity.
We have in Washington a club known as “The Monday Evening Club,” a clearing house for all forms of philanthropy. At the different banquets and at their monthly meetings all forms of reforms, from purely a humanitarian standpoint, are discussed, but we, who go at the open sores of the world with the only sure cure earth has yet received, the religion of Jesus Christ, we receive no recognition, we are given no hearing at banquets, and are never spoken of as part of the city's force for betterment, yet we comfort the prisoner, we bring hope to the hopeless, and we are the real protection of the city. No hungry man is turned from our door unsatisfied. A hungry man is a danger, a man with a hungry family is a menace. He will get food even if it costs a life to obtain it. Like Him whom we serve we are rejected of men. We work amid the social dynamite of a great city. Unless the religious part of this nation assumes its rightful place as arbiter in all labor troubles, saying to the rich man, “Thou shalt not defraud,” and to the poor man, “Thou shalt do no violence”; unless Christian people see to it that remunerative labor can be had by every person willing to work; unless Christian people close the saloons (the author of seventy-five per cent of the sufferings of the poor), on some sad day our great cities will be systematically dynamited. As Christians we must go down among them and make the broken man feel that he is only temporarily sidetracked from the great highway of success. That the grace of God and his own will can and will bring him back to the great highway of prosperity.
The Church is waking up to its full duty in social service. Bishop Simpson, even in his day, eloquently described the mission of the Church in the world: “The Church must grope her way into the alleys and courts and purlieus of the city, and up the broken staircase, and into the bare room and beside the loathsome sufferer; she must go down into the pit with the miner, into the forecastle with the sailor, into the tent with the soldier, into the shop with the mechanic, into the factory with the operative, into the field with the farmer, into the counting-room with the merchant. Like the air, the Church must press equally on all the surfaces of society; like the sea, flow into every nook of the shoreline of humanity, and, like the sun, shine on things foul and low, as well as fair and high, for she was organized, commissioned and equipped for the moral renovation of the world.”