Heathen mothers and their dead children.
While our hearts go out in tenderness to the heathen mother deprived of her living child, what can we do or say to comfort the mother whose little one is cold in death? Our statistics of infant mortality in Chapter I give some slight idea of the vast multitudes of mourning mothers for whom there is no hope, no knowledge that,—“around the throne of God in heaven, thousands of children stand;” no vision of Him who “shall gather the lambs with His arm and carry them in His bosom.” Nowhere but among Christians do hope and faith and self-control and comfort abide in the house where death has come, and none but the Christian cemetery is a place of order and beauty and peace. Among the Thonga Tribe of South Africa, the mother who loses a baby is considered deeply contaminated with the defilement of death. She must bury the child alone, not even her husband helping her. Mrs. George Heber Jones said recently that in all her many years of life in Korea she had never seen any funeral service for a child of non-Christians. The baby is buried anywhere at the back of the house as a dog would be, or put up in the branches of a tree for the vultures to find. Do the mothers have hearts and feelings? Listen to the experience of Mrs. U. S. G. Jones of India, and answer the question for yourselves.
“I went into a Brahmin home where several widows were gathered. One old woman with eyes that were dimmed from much weeping said, peering into my face, ‘Yes, it is the same, I was sure of it. You came here some ten or twelve years ago, and told us how when your beloved were taken from you, you did not mourn and wail as we did. When my daughter died, I tried to recall what you had said about another life and hope beyond the grave, but I could not remember. Tell it all again now.’ So I told her again of our glorious hope and of the resurrection. How earnestly they all listened! Poor, poor things!”[85]
Only the Bible gives the child a place.
“The Child for Christ” must be the watchword of our “organized motherhood for the children of the world.” The Bible is the only sacred book that gives the child a place of importance. Christ was the only founder of a religion who raised childhood into a type of those who were fit to enter His Kingdom. As E. G. Romanes says, “Tenderness toward child life, appreciation of the simplicity and the helplessness of children, affection of parents for their children, and children for their parents;—all these are features of the Bible which the most superficial reader cannot fail to observe.”[86]
The motive for teaching the children of Christ.
In his “Challenge to Christian Missions,” R. E. Welsh utters these significant words,—
“Why is it a matter of urgent duty and concern on a parent’s part to teach his child the story of Christ and train him in Christian truth and life?... What is the parent’s motive?... Simply the sharp sense of the value of Christ to every human being, young or old—the perception of the child’s need and peril if he does not get the saving power of Christ upon him; the sense of the native worth and value of being a Christian in soul and character; the desire to lift him out of ‘the natural man’ to ‘the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.’ If that motive be not strong enough to inspire us with zeal for taking the blessing of Christ to the heathen, then Christ has still much work to do upon us to make us Christian in mind and spiritual sympathy.”
The means to be used.
If it is our duty and privilege to win the children of the world to Christ, how is it to be done? What special means are our missionaries using to bring about this result? All missionary work for children, in the homes, in day school and boarding school, in church and Sunday-School, in hospital and orphanage, must have the great two-fold aim ever in view,—to win the child to Christ, to train the child for Christ. It remains for us to study briefly several agencies not yet touched upon, that have been greatly blessed in their effect upon children of many lands.