“A girl of fifteen was dying,” writes a friend from India. “Her husband, a man of fifty or more, is a man of good position and considerable means. The girl lay in a bare room with nothing but an unbaked earthenware vessel near her. Her second baby had been born a few days or weeks before and something was wrong.... But she was a purdah woman and could not see the doctor. He had asked a few questions from outside and had diagnosed the illness as tuberculosis, was treating it as such,—and had given it as his opinion that she would die. Our pastor’s wife, dear Mrs. Roy, had somehow gone to see her. Even her non-professional eye saw that a mistake had been made, and she tried to persuade the mother to send for a woman doctor. ‘What was the use? She was doing to die.’
“Mrs. Roy expostulated indignantly with the mother for having married this child of twelve to a grown-up man, just for money. The poor child seemed so sad. Mrs. Roy told her of the Christian’s hope and a Saviour’s love. The child listened with the tears running down her face. Then she asked, ‘May I touch you?’ (Being a mother of a few days she was still unclean and no one would touch her). So Mrs. Roy went to her and held her hands and stroked her face and hair and tried to give her comfort for the journey for which she was so little prepared. Thus is the ‘hope of India’ MURDERED by custom and carelessness and greed. Oh, India is horrible!”
Statistics from India. Child-marriage; Child-widowhood.
From the Missionary Review of the World (August, 1911) we quote the following statistics, each word and figure of which cries out to us Christian women, “How long, oh, how long, shall these things be?”
The figures are appalling in respect of child-marriages. The census of 1901 showed 121,500 married boys and 243,500 married girls, whose age was under five: 760,000 boys and 2,030,000 girls between the ages of five and ten; 2,540,000 and 6,586,000 between ten and fifteen. Of these, all except a certain number of girls under the last class were married before they were able to realize what marriage is. The most deplorable result of such marriages is seen in the number of widowed children; 6,000 widowers and 96,000 widows were between five and ten; 113,000 widowers and 276,000 widows between ten and fifteen.
The homes of the world need Christ.
The homes of the world need nothing so much as the presence and blessing of the Christ who brought cheer to the home in Cana, comfort to the widow’s home at Nain, resurrection and life to the home at Bethany, vision to the home in Emmaus. How are we to help to make it possible that fathers, mothers, and children in homes where He is not known should hear Him as He stands at the door and knocks, and shall open to Him that He may sup with them and they with Him? Three methods of bringing Christ to needy homes. There are at least three practical methods by which Christian women may help to bring about this result.
First: Through Christian schools which take children and youth in their impressionable years and train them to be the Christian fathers and mothers of the future. We have briefly alluded to this method and shall speak of it more at length in a later chapter.
Second: In Zenana work and other forms of visiting in the homes, in crowded cities, and isolated villages, taking to each individual home the story of the Christ who gathered the little ones in His arms, and the practical, homely lessons of efforts that Christian civilization is making in behalf of home life.
Third: Through the great object lesson, the missionary home.