It is one of the most difficult lessons to impress on those who have become Christians that true Christianity, lived out to its logical conclusion, includes all that proper physical care of the child which, with the right mental and spiritual training, shall prepare it to take its place in the world.
Dr. Exner, recently in physical educational work in the Y. M. C. A. at Shanghai, says:—
Hygiene and the child problem.
“The need of the knowledge of hygiene has a very definite bearing on the child problem. Thousands upon thousands of children are killed simply for the lack of knowledge of the simplest elements of feeding and care. To illustrate: A well educated Chinese teacher, graduate of a mission school, fed his five months’ old daughter a piece of rich cake. It developed intestinal trouble from which it died in spite of expert medical care. When I expressed my sympathy, he said, ‘Well, it is the Lord’s will.’ I added to myself, ‘You should know better!’”
How much easier it is to say piously, “It is the Lord’s will,” than to take trouble and bear expense and lay aside age-long custom and prejudice in order that little ones may live! But we must not judge too harshly when we remember how long it has taken more enlightened lands to learn the great value of the lives of the children and how to care for these lives. Rather should we be all the more ready to send and carry to them the light and knowledge that have come to us. Then there will be fewer such scenes as one missionary mother witnessed in Syria. It was in a Jewish family where there were four little girls. The baby was a mass of sores from head to foot, and the missionary physician said that they were merely the result of mal-nutrition. But the mother said that her husband was utterly unwilling to buy a little milk each day,—“It is not worth while, for she is only another little girl.”
Special work for missionary mothers.
It is a most legitimate and absolutely essential part of missionary work,—and not one of the easiest tasks, either,—to teach parents that “children intelligently fed during infancy, childhood, and youth may hope for normal health in adult life, with natural physical strength, endurance, buoyancy.” Here is a special field of labor for missionary mothers, who have this advantage over physicians and teachers that they can teach by object lessons which always make a deeper impression than exhortation or verbal instruction. Of course the missionary mother often has the great handicap of an adverse climate in which to bring up her child. But her intelligent application of the principles she should learn in order to fit her for motherhood, and her willingness to teach these principles to the ignorant mothers so interested in all that pertains to the little foreign baby, may be some of the greatest factors in the future welfare, stamina, and development of great nations such as China and India.
Children starving.
Which is more harmful to a child, reckless, indiscriminate over-feeding or under-feeding and starvation diet? In lands swept periodically by famine or flood or devastated by war and massacre, there are thousands of little children who literally starve to death while other thousands continue to exist,—but what an existence it is! How can it but have its evil effect on the mind and morals of a child as well as on its physical well-being to be deprived of proper or sufficient nourishment during the years of growth and development? If child welfare is the legitimate, rightful responsibility of every Christian woman, then it behooves us to see that such scenes as the following cease to be possible anywhere in the world.
One mother, a widow with four children dependent on her, told me, with tears streaming down her face, how she had tried to throw away the skeleton-like little baby she carried in her arms, but she said the child always found its way back to her, and she added, “It is not easy to give one’s own child away.” She said she felt sometimes she would just have to drink poison, and put an end to her miserable existence, and one of the others asked her what would become of her children if she did that, and she said, with despair in every feature, “Don’t ask me.”[10]