American children at work for Christ.
What part are our own precious children in Christian America to have in this great subject,—the Child at Work for Christ? Are they alone to be left out, or to have but a paltry share in the glorious work of giving the Gospel of Christ to the whole world? If the work is worth doing, if the result justifies the effort, if the children of the world need Christ, then it is unjust, unfair, un-Christian, to deny our children a share in the labor and the reward. Nor may we deny them the training and teaching that will make them realize not only the need, but—the one only adequate way in which that need may be satisfied. A few words from the pen of Dr. William Adams Brown emphasize very practically the need of this “only adequate way.”
The one great need of the world.
There are many persons today who are ready to recognize the beneficent work done by foreign missionaries for the social welfare of the peoples among whom they have been working, who have no sympathy with the religious motives which animate them. Why, they ask, can we not have the hospital and the school without the doctrines that go with them? They forget that it is faith in the realities which the doctrines express which alone has made the missionary enterprise possible. Had it not been for the belief that man is an immortal spirit capable of communion with God, and meant for fellowship with Him throughout all eternity, we should have had no Livingstone or Moffatt or Paton. James Russell Lowell saw this clearly when he spoke the striking sentences which have often been quoted, but which will bear quoting again:—
“When the keen scrutiny of skeptics has found a place on this planet where a decent man may live in decency, comfort, and security, supporting and educating his children unspoiled and unpolluted, a place where age is reverenced, infancy protected, womanhood honored, and human life held in due regard,—when skeptics can find such a place ten miles square on this globe, where the Gospel of Christ has not gone before and cleared the way and laid foundations that made decency and security possible, it will then be in order for these skeptical literati to move thither and there ventilate their views. But so long as these men are dependent on the very religion which they discard for every privilege they enjoy, they may well hesitate to rob the Christian of his hope and humanity of its faith in the Saviour who alone has given to men that hope of eternal life which makes life tolerable and society possible, and robs death of its terrors and the grave of its gloom.”[116]
Children trained to systematic giving.
Is there anything more beautiful and spontaneous than the generosity of a child who has learned to give to others because of its love for Christ? The churches that are systematically training their children to give have a great future before them.
Says The Spirit of Missions: “There is an old Scotch proverb that ‘Mony a mickle maks a muckle.’ Nowhere is this more effectively demonstrated than in the Lenten offering given each year by the Sunday-Schools of the church. This movement was begun thirty-five years ago in the diocese of Pennsylvania, and almost at once it spread throughout the church. Year by year the volume of gifts has grown, until for the whole period they have reached the amazing sum of $2,618,290.86. The gifts which have produced this result have come from all quarters of the earth and from all manner of children. Youngsters in Alaska have shovelled snow and others in California have raised flowers to earn their money for this purpose. The negro boys and girls of Africa, the peons of Mexico, the Igorotes of the Philippines, and the brown and yellow children of Japan and China have gathered the odd coins of their several countries in common with the children of the mountains and prairies, the small towns and the great cities of the United States.”[117]
One who had spent some years in India tells of an experience in Chicago that brings the quick tears to one’s eyes.
From Chicago to India.
“I had been telling the children at Olivet Institute in Chicago of the little girls in Fatehgarh who called Christmas the Great Day and who had never had any Great Day to look forward to at all until they had come to the mission school; of Gunga De, who had worked so hard to deserve a doll on the Great Day and learned the Beatitudes and her psalms and prayers, only to have her Hindu father take her away to bathe in the Ganges so that she would miss the prize giving, and of her joy when she found the doll waiting for her the next day. Afterwards as I stood waiting for the car on a dreary sordid Halstead Street corner, a little stranger who had wandered into the meeting came and stood beside me. A thin shawl was over her head, and the hand that held it together under her chin was thin and blue with the cold. There were dark circles under her eyes, and the little face had no look of childhood about it.