Slowly we are getting back to the recognition of the proper place of fact, of its power as the background and basis against which and upon which Personality must stand. Our eyes are opening to see that if the girl is to gain a religion which shall mean life, she must gain it through a person who reveals a Person.
Here is Mary D——, a girl of fifteen, a worker in a mill employing a very cheap grade of help. Her face was hard, there was no light of anticipation in her eyes—she had nothing to anticipate. She toiled through the long hours, for there was no limit to her day in the state where she lives. Her home was not a home but a place where she could stay nights—when her father was not so quarrelsome through cheap drink that he drove her out. One day a woman at a noon service in the factory shocked at a profane remark of Mary's said reprovingly, "Don't you believe there is a God?" "Sure I do," said Mary, "but I don't see's it makes no difference to me." Further questions followed and Mary declared her belief, adding, "I don't bother much about them things." Mary had some facts and declared some sort of belief in them, but they made no difference.
THE FUTURE PROMISES NOTHING AND SHE HAS LOST HOPE
The next summer, Mary, overcome by the work of the year and an attack of the grippe, was sent by a woman in one of the churches, to a girl's camp. She lived in decent fashion, she saw a lake, great mountains, sunsets and stars! She found flowers and sat quite still watching birds that seemed so marvelous to her.
Slowly she grew strong. One night she went to the sloping bank by the lake under the great pine trees to attend the twilight service. The sky was crimson with the sunset and there was a wonderful path of light across the lake. The songs and the beauty moved Mary's soul. She wanted something with all her heart that she had never wanted before. She did not know what it (the great change) was at first, but before she slept she turned to another girl in the tent and expressed it as best she could—"I want to be good," she said.
Through the weeks that followed she saw in the faces, in the kindness and courtesy, in the good times she had never known, in the women who planned them and in the songs and talks at sunset a Person. She heard His name often. He represented all of the happiness and comfort she had ever known and one day with all the eagerness of an awakened soul she said, "I love Him." They told her what changes must come in the life of a girl who said those words and meant them, for they had seen the faults in her and they were many. She was undaunted by all they said she must do, and answered in her uncouth fashion, "I'd die doin' them fur Him."
They wanted her to leave the mill but she said no, one of the girls was leaving and she was to have her place with lighter work. She wanted to go back and tell the girls some things, she said.
Not three years have passed but Mary D—— is a new girl. She is attractive; one can scarcely believe unless he has seen it. She is clean; she is happy. Her friends secured a position for her father out-of-doors where he had loved to work as a boy. Mary took him to the Mission and there he promised to begin the fight against his enemy. The men in the Mission helped. Regular pay made a decent home possible. They have begun to live.
Overcome by the effects of ignorance and sin, failures as citizens, as individuals, as human souls, they met a Person and life was transformed. If it were possible to replace in every factory for Mary D—— who assented to the facts but passed them by as having nothing to do with her, Mary D—— who met a Person and loved Him what a world of new moral forces we could create!