“Children (both boys and girls) will be received at from six to eight years of age. Older children may be accepted, but it is important for the attainment of the best results that pupils begin the work within the age limits named. Miss Philadelpheus, the teacher, has spent two years at the Clark School for the Deaf, Northampton, Mass., in preparation for this work. Both the home and school life of the children are under the most careful supervision.”[47]
Deaf and dumb school in China.
One in every five hundred of China’s vast population is estimated to be deaf and dumb. The only school in China for such unfortunates is in Chefoo and was started in 1898 as an independent work by Mrs. A. T. Mills, for many years a member of the Presbyterian Mission, which heartily approves of the school, but has no funds with which to support it. Boys and girls are taught in this school to read, write, and speak, and are given as much elementary knowledge as is possible, while being trained to useful occupations by which they may hope to be self-supporting. Such constructive work for children who are handicapped is considered absolutely necessary in America and Europe. Is there in your opinion any necessity for multiplying such agencies in non-Christian lands?
Does it pay to help in Christ’s name even one of these little ones? Are they worth helping? Which one of us could do the work of the blind reader of Amritsar in India?
The blind reader of Amritsar.
“A peculiarly bright, happy-looking girl of about eighteen, sitting down at the beginning of the morning in one of our Amritsar dispensaries, with her large Gospel of St. Matthew, in Dr. Moon’s system of raised characters for the blind, open on her knees; she can see nothing, but her fingers move swiftly across the page, and she begins to read better than some persons who have the use of their eyes! As the morning goes on, all the sick who come for medicine will listen with astonishment and pleasure, and she will have opportunities of witnessing for Jesus to those who ask her a reason for the hope that is in her. She was once herself in the darkness of Mohammedanism, and in the Blind School found Christ. She is now a rejoicing and consistent Christian. Do you think that, as we stood and watched her delight in reading the comfortable words of our Saviour Christ, we asked ourselves if to bring such to the Lord were work worth doing? Rather, is it not a service which angels might envy?”[48]
A leprous mother.
A leprous mother, outcast of society, doomed to spend the rest of her life in a leper village and to drag out a miserable existence among those who are afflicted and suffering like herself! What, oh what, shall she do with her children, as yet untainted by the frightful disease, but sure to develop it if they too go to the leper village? And yet who is there in the wide world to care for her little ones? Her husband is up at the village, hands gone, sightless eyes, disfigured face,—he cannot help. No relatives or neighbors will be bothered with the children of the outcast, and yet that mother heart beats with an intense, despairing mother love as yours or mine might,—with a love that can bear all suffering and even slow death for herself if only her children are safe. Hark, a neighbor calls to her from a safe distance,—“Do you know that those foreign Jesus people have a place where they take the children of those who are accursed of God like yourself? They take them and feed them and teach them their Jesus religion and train them to earn their living.” Oh, it is the one word of hope and courage, the one ray of light in utter darkness, and the little children are left on the threshold of the Home for Untainted Children, and the leper mother learns of a Home where she herself may go and where she and her husband may receive loving care and unheard-of comfort, and where the years of suffering are illumined by the knowledge of another Home where she may meet her darlings once more, and “where the inhabitant shall not say, I am sick.”
Homes for untainted children of lepers.
“Twenty-one Homes for the untainted children of leprous parents in which about five hundred boys and girls are being brought up to healthy and useful lives and saved from adding to the terrible total of diseased outcasts,”[49] this is the record of the work of Christian missions thus far. Compare with it the record of what in this modern day has been done in the name of an attempt at civilization which leaves Christianity entirely out of account.