Besides our regular religious services, including our large and delightful Sabbath-school, we have various reformative and benevolent societies. Our temperance society carries the triple pledge at the front and saves many from the debasement of profanity, tobacco and ardent spirits in all their forms.
Our societies for social purity are designed to help in the cure of a terrible and terribly prevalent vice. The young men are taught, that while it would often be simply throwing life, with all its opportunities, away, for them to interpose by word or weapon in defense of weak and tempted womanhood, after all, man best defends woman by himself wearing the "White Cross" of manly virtue.
The girls are taught that woman's best defense is the "White Shield" of her own determined virtue and genuine modesty. The Y.M.C.A. and the Y.W.C.A. have interesting meetings conducted by themselves, with many committees for Christian work. A committee of girls goes out on Saturday to visit sick and aged ones, both giving and receiving good. Another looks after new scholars who are often confused by their strange surroundings, and homesick for a time.
Our Missionary Society studies both home and foreign fields, and gives freely of its little fund. Recently a flame of missionary zeal was kindled by letters from missionaries in Africa with whom a number of our students were personally somewhat acquainted, and a large portion of our Sunday-school collections was voted directly to them.
All our students sympathize with the Indians, and there are two societies of the younger scholars who help them. The outside sewing-bands too, devoted their very first quilt to the Rosebud Indian Mission. "The field is the world" and "the work is one, one!"
Now, I ask you, friends, should not such work as this be amply sustained? So much more could be accomplished if the funds and sympathy were not so stinted! "The destruction of the poor is their poverty." We do not believe in giving money outright to pauperize these young people, but the money must be there or they can not be taken into the household, and trained and fitted to do valiant service for Christ, and the nation and the world. There are manifold ways of helping, but I shall not mention one, for if any are moved to help—as many are and have been—it will be so easy to find out a way.
Mrs. Dinah Mulock Craik was prompted to write her last book—in behalf of North of Ireland sufferers—by hearing a rough carter in a London street, who had got down from his cart to help a timid child over a crowded crossing, and had been rallied upon his soft-heartedness, say, "O, aye! but a 'andful o' 'elp is wuth a cartload o' pity."
As I have visited institutions rich in buildings, books, scholarships, professorships and every appliance, I have been very far from wishing their abundance less, but I have said in my heart, ought not this and similar missionary schools to be endowed also for their work of broad beneficence, reaching not only the far South of our own land, but to the heart of the great dark continent with its two hundred millions of perishing souls?