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HOME MISSIONS IN ACTION
BY
EDITH H. ALLEN
To
MY FATHER A
Christian Patriot
FROM THE PUBLICATION COMMITTEE
The general topic for the text books for 1915-16, as first chosen
by the "Committee of Twenty-eight," was "The Church at Its Task."
This committee is composed of representatives from the four
missionary organizations: the Home Missions Council; the Council
of Women for Home Missions; the Conference of Foreign Mission
Boards and the Federation of Women's Boards of Foreign Missions.
The outbreak of the great war of the nations brought new duties
and questions of adjustment to the Christian church; the Committee
has recognized this in changing the original topic to "The Church
and the Nations."
This book is written from the standpoint of the words chosen as
the key note for the year, "Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done on
earth." It recognizes the fact that the Kingdom cannot come to our
land, or to the world unless all social conditions are drawn
within its scope; it emphasizes the desire of Home Missions and
the church to work toward this great end, and the recognition of
their responsibility for its accomplishment. But unless the
nations of the world are trending toward the day when peace shall
reign and hatred and strife cease among men, these desires cannot
be realized. With this in view the portions dealing with social
conditions and peace possibilities have been written.
That this book may reveal the far-reaching potentialities of Home
Missions as a dynamic force for reclaiming, educating, healing,
and integrating our nation into a land over which the Christ shall
reign and that from Him it shall also draw its ideals and its
power, is the hope and the prayer of the author and the Council of
Women for Home Missions.
CONTENTS
I. A NATIONAL FORCE
II. A RECLAIMING FORCE
III. AN EDUCATIVE FORCE
IV. A HEALING FORCE
V. AN INTEGRATING FORCE
VI. SOURCES OF POWER
I
A NATIONAL FORCE PRAYER FOR THE CHURCH
O God, we pray for thy Church, which is set to-day amid the
perplexities of a changing order, and face to face with a great
new task. We remember with love the nurture she gave to our
spiritual life in its infancy, the tasks she set for our growing
strength, the influence of the devoted hearts she gathers, the
steadfast power for good she has exerted. When we compare her with
all other human institutions, we rejoice, for there is none like
her. But when we judge her by the mind of her Master, we bow in
pity and contrition. Oh, baptize her afresh in the life-giving
spirit of Jesus! Grant her a new birth, though it be with the
travail of repentance and humiliation. Bestow upon her a more
imperious responsiveness to duty, a swifter compassion with
suffering, and an utter loyalty to the will of God. Put upon her
lips the ancient gospel of her Lord. Help her to proclaim boldly
the coming of the Kingdom of God and the doom of all that resist
it. Fill her with the prophets' scorn of tyranny, and with a
Christ-like tenderness for the heavy-laden and down-trodden. Give
her faith to espouse the cause of the people, and in their hands
that grope after freedom and light to recognize the bleeding hands
of the Christ. Bid her cease from seeking her own life, lest she
lose it. Make her valiant to give up her life to humanity, that
like her crucified Lord she may mount by the path of the cross to
a higher glory.
--Walter Rauschenbusch.
* * * * *
Home Missions may be defined as the out-reaching of the Christian
church in America to those peoples and places in our land beyond
the immediate environs of the local church.
From the time the Pilgrim, the Dutch, the Cavalier stepped on
these shores the church (and included in it Home Missions) has
exerted a most powerful influence upon the ideals and standards of
life on this continent.
While shaping and moulding the thought and life of the people, it
has itself developed a content and vision infinitely greater, more
inclusive, more of the spirit of the Christ's "I am come that ye
might have life and have it more abundantly," than was dreamed of
in the days of its beginning.
"The hidden forces of national life are instinctive and
unconscious. One cannot differentiate natural influences so as to
ascribe to each its value. The ideals of nations, like those of
individuals, are derived from all the concrete qualities of
character." [Footnote: F. H. Giddings in "Democracy and Empire."]
The ideals which are a compelling force in our nation to-day
cannot be ascribed to any one force, but are the result of all
those formative reactions which are the product of racial,
economic, social, ethical and religious forces, the latter being
pre-eminently the most marked.
It will be remembered that into the new and harder life of the
successive frontiers, Home Missions entered, bringing a saving power,
as well as one that softened and glorified the renunciations and
sacrifices attendant always upon frontier life.
Indeed, the most marked characteristics of our national life
until recent years have been those born of contact with frontier
conditions--courage, discipline, an austere sense of duty, a
passion for work, marvelous practicality joined to a fundamental
idealism and love of sentiment, an unconquerable hopefulness and
an innate kindness and personal helpfulness.
Of necessity the conditions and environs of the country have
reacted upon the religious ideals and life of our people. We can
not enter into the fullest understanding of the present place and
influence of Home Missions as a National Force, or a study of its
immediate future, without pausing to review the background of the
past. For we recognize that growth, organization and development
are all functions of _time_.
The early fathers had no thought of founding a nation when they sought
refuge and a new start on this continent. Jamestown, New York, Plymouth
and their outgrowing settlements were intensely individualistic. They
were the individual Cavalier, Hollander or Pilgrim, only in larger
proportions, bearing all their characteristics.
To appreciate the characteristics and spirit of these colonists,
we must consider the special significance of the age that gave
them birth. They "were the children of a century in which the
human spirit had a new birth in energy of imagination, in faith
in its powers to dare greatly and achieve greatly." [Footnote:
Hamilton Wright Mabie--American Ideals, Character and Life.]
They were inspired most strongly by religious aspirations,
although combining with these impelling political convictions.
In the Puritan colony, "membership in the church for some time
remained a qualification for voting."
"In nearly every document which conveyed authority to discoverers,
explorers, and settlers in the New World, the Christian religion
was recognized." [Footnote: Hamilton Wright Mabie--American
Ideals, Character and Life.]
Their faith was of heroic quality, of rock firmness; their
obedience to duty as they saw it, almost absolute.
The Bible exerted a tremendous influence. It was not only their
religious guide and teacher, but was also their library, daily
companion and for some time their only literature. It became
wrought into the very fibre of their thought.
This dominating religious attitude, while modified in the
different types--the Friends, Huguenots, Moravians--gave the
impulses which have had so strong a formative influence upon the
life of the nation.
Recognizing fully the incalculable value of this early religious
contribution, we cannot fail also to realize the limitations of
the religious outlook of that period, and the effect of these
limitations upon the social life of the country. Seventeenth
century religion laid its emphasis upon the subjective--upon
definitions of religious belief--and found expression in theological
discussion and opinion. It concerned itself intensely with the
individual as regards his spiritual life, but took little or no
account of the outward conditions that bear so powerfully upon
the inner life. Thus in its growth the church failed to exercise
that commanding influence in the redemption of society and the
_forming_ of social conditions which should have accompanied the
preaching of individual salvation.
It entered deeply, reverently, passionately into the spirit of the
first commandment: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy
heart and with all thy soul and with all thy might," but failed in
holding with equal grasp the second, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor
as thyself."
Had the church, had Home Missions, entered fully into the spirit
of this second commandment, its enormous restraining, organizing,
saving power would have contributed more fully to the _forming_ of
the community life before it so desperately needed _re_forming--to
dealing with those great fundamental conditions which have led to
the "submerged" of our civilization.
To-day we are coming to recognize the vital connection between
spiritual regeneration and the bringing of the Kingdom of God on
Earth. Home Missions is essentially and radically concerned with
both. Rev. David Watson in his "Social Advance" says:
"Theology and sociology are closely kin and in a sense
complementary. Theology deals with man's relation to God,
Sociology with man's relation to his fellows. The one is the
science of God, the other is the science of society.
"The goal of all real social advance, as of all Home Mission
effort, should be the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth
in all its gracious fullness; and the method fourfold, by
spiritual dynamics (the church and its Home Missions), moral
culture, economic change and wise legislation."
First, the Gospel, with its message of individual salvation, and
the Kingdom of God, this opening the way for and bringing with it
education and moral culture, and the control of economic forces by
legislation.
"Only through the unified action of all these forces is continued
progress assured."
The church has eagerly sought to comply with the first three
requisites, but its failure to recognize the specific influence it
might exert along the lines of the economic and legislative have
retarded mightily the better day in this land and hindered the
best and highest attainment of our democracy.
The concept of the Christian ideal to-day is that it shall save the
individual, but also remove that which produces crime and makes sin
almost inevitable--in short, that it shall seek to redeem the
environment as well as the sinner, and give more wholesomeness,
more fullness, more joy to life through redeeming its conditions,
as well as saving its soul.
On the church and its outreaching Home Missions as the instrument
for the Kingdom-progress, rests a heavy responsibility in supplying
that spiritual dynamic and inspiration which is back of all social
upbuilding. It must produce the men and women whose characters are
such that in their attitude toward industry, labor, legislation, in
all their social capacities, they will seek to live Christ's social
principle, "What ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so
to them," and to bring the Master's Beatitudes as a working principle
into life.
Before considering what we have left undone, let us review in
outline the splendid record of Home Missions.
Since the early days when Roger Williams pressed into the wilderness
of Rhode Island, the Christian preacher and teacher have followed
the advancing line of the successive frontiers--no hardship, no
denial, no scarcity of food, no privation, no want or cold so great
that Home Missions hesitated to go, with its spiritual healing, its
community service, bringing the very heart of Christ's love and
service into these new centers. When adventurous home-seekers reached
the Alleghanies, the Iowa Band soon followed. When the fate of the
great Northwest hung in the balance, a missionary statesman came to
its saving.
When the frozen North called men with its lure of gold, an
indomitable missionary led in all that made for the better life.
When a devastating war had spent its fury and a helpless Africa,
bound by heaviest chains of ignorance and superstition, waited,
Home Missions responded.
When the deposed Red brother suffered every form of grievous
wrong, Home Missions brought him brotherly love and helped him
find the Jesus Road. When the alien stood bewildered in our midst,
Home Missions gave him guidance. When the dumb appeal of the
isolated mountaineers was realized, Home Missions followed the
lonely mountain trail. To the mines and the lumber camps, to the
ancient Spanish folk of our continent, to those deluded by the
false Prophet--to all of these Home Missions has carried its
threefold ministry of saving, teaching and training.
Home Missions counts its lives laid down for the Christ on a
hundred fields. No pen can tell of the magnitude of its influence
on our national life. Its little enterprises are now the great,
strong city churches of Nebraska, Kansas, California, Oregon, in
fact of all the States.
It was a Congregational pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Porter, who
preached the first sermon on Lake Michigan, as he held a service
in the carpenter shop of Fort Dearborn in 1833. The population of
what afterward became the city of Chicago then numbered three
hundred. As a result of the efforts of Rev. Mr. Porter, who
organized the first Presbyterian church in the city of Chicago
while working also for the Congregational church, many of the
present centers of Christian influence were instituted in that
city.
It is instructive to note the returns from one Home Mission
enterprise. On the Pacific coast the Congregational Home Missionary
Society in sixty-two years spent $1,646,000. In thirty-two years
the churches thus founded sent $864,000 to carry Christ's message
to foreign countries, and $302,000 through other Congregational
agencies for uplift in this country. This was given in addition
to all the local philanthropies and social service rendered in
their own communities by these organizations.
The history of the first Presbyterian Church of Portland, Oregon,
is one of the outstanding illustrations of the fruitfulness of
Home Mission work. "This church was organized on January first,
1854, with ten members. It was a strictly Home Mission work,
dependent upon the Home Board for its existence. When it was
reorganized in 1860 it had but seventeen members, and they were
unable to pay the salary.
"During the next four years it received aid from the Board of Home
Missions to the amount of eleven hundred dollars. Then it undertook
self-support. It has been blessed in having a line of far-seeing
pastors who have led it on from strength to strength.
"As its members increased in wealth they grew in their interest in
the advancement of the Kingdom of God. Every enterprise which
helped on that Kingdom was either begun or promoted by the First
Church. The first missionary to Alaska went out from it, and her
expenses were paid for six months from the treasury of the First
Church.
"The steady development of the Oregon Territory engaged the eager
interest of this church from the first. It is said that in all
that district, including Oregon, Washington and part of Idaho, no
Presbyterian church was ever erected which did not receive some
aid from the members of the First Church of Portland.
"In a single year of its history it has contributed twenty thousand
dollars to Home Missions, and it is because of the large share in the
Home Mission work of the Presbytery of Portland taken by the First
Church that that Presbytery was able to assume self-support, and so
become the first self-supporting Presbytery in the great Northwest.
"This church also fostered the educational interests of the
Northwest. Albany College in Oregon owes its existence in large
measure to its generosity. Portland Academy was early taken over
by its members, and to-day is equal to any secondary school in the
country. The San Francisco Theological Seminary came into a full
share of aid and care. The Ladd professorship is a lasting proof
of the spirit of that church.
"The increasing numbers of Chinese attracted the attention of the
church, and the first mission to the Chinese by the Presbyterian
Church was established in 1885 on petition of the pastor of the
First Church.
"Its foreign mission work has been extensive. Not only has it sent
out its own members to the foreign mission field, but it has been
from the very beginning a liberal supporter of Foreign Missions.
The first Foreign Mission Society of Oregon was organized in this
church, and the splendid North Pacific Board of Missions, broad
enough minded to see the whole task of the church, was organized
here, and is to-day an eager supporter of Home, Foreign and
Freedmen's missions.
"Nor has the church been unmindful of its debt to this ever-growing
city of Portland." [Footnote: Rev. Charles L. Thompson, D.D.]
Illustrations of similar service might be multiplied many times
from the history of other denominations.
With all this glorious, Christ-filled service, Home Missions has
ministered to only a small part. Over sixty millions of the nearly
one hundred of our population are non-Christian and allied with no
religious organizations whatever--Catholic, Hebrew, or Protestant.
Still more than forty thousand Indians in this country are without
Christian ministry. Still great districts in our Southern mountains
wait the coming of opportunity and uplift. Still large numbers of
Mexicans in the Southwest, ignorant and superstitious, are a retarding
element in their communities. Still vast immigrant settlements remain
untouched by regenerating influences and absorb, as well as contribute,
much that is deteriorating.
Still the traitorous hierarchy, Mormonism, makes enormous strides
almost unchecked by Christian effort. The Mormon Church officially
makes the following report of its mission work in this country and
abroad in one year: Tracts distributed, 10,892,122; gospel
conversations, 1,744,641; families visited, 3,532,273; books
distributed and standard church works, 500,614; meetings held,
92,072.
Still from our cities comes the bitter cry of the submerged and of
the women and girls whom unspeakable sin is claiming. "The United
States has the largest proportion of women workers to the
population in the world (one in five). [Footnote: Henry C.
Vedder--The Gospel of Jesus and the Problem of Democracy.] It has
done less toward the regulation of this form of labor--less for
the protection of its women laborers--than any other country."
The recent investigations in Chicago and other large cities show
the close relation between insufficient wages and vice.
One of the greatest obstacles to the relief of these conditions is
the indifference of well-to-do people who do not come into
personal contact with the wrongs and sufferings of the working
people.
Still we are confronted by the sad spectacle of more than a
million of the nation's children at work in factories and cotton
mills for their living, and helping to support their families.
"The child is the embodied future. We can never have good
citizenship without protected childhood. Child labor is a process
of squandering future wealth to satisfy present need." [Footnote:
See report of Eleventh Conference of Child Labor held at Washington,
January, 1915.]
Defrauded childhood! Children, loaded with heavy tasks beyond
their strength, robbed of the light and joy of life, plead for
childhood's rights and that spiritual development that should make
known to them the companionship of the Saviour and the love of the
Heavenly Father.
The testimony printed in the fall of 1912, concerning child labor
in the canning factories of the Empire State, shows that more than
a thousand children were employed in the canning industry that
summer; one hundred and forty-one were less than ten years old.
An experienced manufacturer has said, "You can protect a machine,
you can guide the buzz-saw, but no law that you can enact can, in
a large industry, protect the heart and soul of the child."
A marked improvement has been made in the last five years in combating
the evils of child labor. Many states forbid the employment of children
under fourteen years of age in factories and mills--but in North and
South Carolina, in Georgia and Alabama, children under fourteen are
still permitted to labor in factories ten or twelve hours a day.
To reach this evil from the Federal standpoint, the powers of the
Inter-State Commerce Commission should be invoked.
A bill is now pending (February, 1915) before Congress to bar from
interstate commerce the products of mills, mines, quarries,
factories and workshops employing child labor.
Home Missions must also face to-day the infinitely complex and
rapidly increasing problem involved in the adjustment of our
population to cities and away from rural districts. Thus cities
are becoming dominant factors to be reckoned with in all the
elements that enter into the question of religious and moral
uplift, as well as the ideals and the welfare of our nation.
Here the aggregation of immigrants focuses acutely the complex
problems peculiar to them.
Here is the child laborer in factories and on the streets.
Here women and girls struggle under fearful economic pressure.
Here is the political boss--and what ex-President Roosevelt terms
"organized alliance between the criminal rich and the criminal poor."
Here is the class consciousness and hatred--the cry of anarchy and
socialism.
"To-day seventy-six per cent of the population of Massachusetts live
in cities; of New York, eighty-five and one-half per cent; New Jersey,
sixty-one and two-tenths; Connecticut, fifty-three and two-tenths;
Illinois is one-half urban, and forty per cent of California's people
live under city conditions." [Footnote: Frederic C. Howe--The City,
the Hope of Democracy.]
Contrasted with this peculiar burden of the city, there is the country
church and the adaptation needed to maintain it in any degree of
effectiveness, when its very life blood has been drained for the
city. It has made untold contributions of ministers, missionaries,
church officers and members to the cities and distant fields, leaving
the mother church childless and weak in its advancing years.
Changes that leave almost none of its former constituency confront
the country church.
Old farms and village stores pass into the hands of aliens--in
many instances Hebrews--summer boarders claim the attention of the
faithful women of the congregation for the most favorable months
of the year. Sunday sports engage the interests of the indifferent,
and there are many other disintegrating elements.
In a land where progress calls to progress, where the results of
hasty development create a large share of its problem--a land
where the need of Christian effort is paramount, and where such
effort is so vital to the world, the decadence of the country
church is of far-reaching significance. Home Missions is called to
direct its energizing, constructive ability to the solution of
this baffling and discouraging feature of its problem to a greater
degree than ever before.
Home Missions at this time also confronts a new opportunity and
obligation--to make its voice heard, its influence felt, for
international peace.
These winter days of 1914, in which the world has apparently lost
its soul in the fury of slaughter, speak very loudly to the heart
of Christianity.
No force for the upbuilding of the Christ power on earth can
ignore the significance and solemnity of this time.
Has Christianity failed in these warring lands, or have they who
are controlled by Christian standards and ethics in other relations,
failed to apprehend that the Christ test--His principles--must be
brought to bear upon _all_ of life--upon personal, individual,
national and international relations?
The fruition of Christianity must at last bring in the day when
the conscience of Christian nations will hold true to the Master's
teaching. "What ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so
to them," must be wrought into national consciousness and practiced
as an international principle. With the fatherhood of God, the
_brotherhood_ of man is the very heart of the Gospel message.
Home Missions must take account of the moral reactions of such
carnage as is now taking place.
"Death meets those myriads whilst indulging the most appalling
passions--their hands filled with weapons of carnage, their hearts
with fratricidal hate. It is the sense of the moral death involved,
searing of conscience, deadening of heart, blunting of moral faculty,
fruits of death brought forth in the soul of the survivor, which are
more horrifying to the enlightened consciousness than the dying groans
of the stricken can be to the more bodily nerve. The thing to fear is
not pain, but trespass; not suffering, but sin--the peculiar sin of
war is that it corrupts while it consumes, that it demoralizes whilst
it destroys. It is not because war kills that it is the devil, but
because it depraves; and it is because it depraves that it is condemned
by the religious consciousness. The damage that it inflicts upon the
persons and property of men is trifling beside the damage it inflicts
upon morals; and it is this that is exciting in thoughtful minds a
fresh interest in the whole military conception. The ominous thing is
not the body prostrate on the battlefield, but the brute rampant in
the mother-land; the general lowering of ideal, the blatant materialism
and defiant selfishness." [Footnote: Walter Walsh--The Moral Damage
of War.]
Home Missions must consider the responsibility of our Christian
nation toward the attitude of world thought that made possible
this war. It was John Hay in his instructions to our American
delegates to the First Hague Conference who said: "Next to the
great fact of a nation's independence is the great fact of its
interdependence." [Footnote: William I. Hull--The New Peace
Movement.]
Through travel, cultural influences, commerce, the rapid circulation
of news, the cultivation of sympathy, there is a recognized oneness
of the world to-day; a solidarity which, notwithstanding all the
differences arising from remoteness, race, legislation, and religion,
binds together the world as never before.
The world is realizing to-day, as one of the results of this
conflict, that in the largest sense its interests are one, and
that all nations are interdependent.
"America must remember that the military idea and the ideal of
democracy are absolutely opposed."
Dr. Josiah Strong, in a powerful presentation of the effects of
the war says: "Evidently the increasing interdependence of the
nations is creating new international rights and duties, but there
is no world legislature to recognize and legalize them, there is
no world judiciary to interpret and apply them, and there is no
world executive to enforce and vitalize them.
"The economic and industrial organization of the world has far
outgrown the political organization of the world." [Footnote: The
Gospel of the Kingdom, January, 1915.]
Some new world organization is needed and must come to supply this
deficiency.
Home Missions must use its influence to build up a Christian
sentiment for the adjustment of international disagreements other
than by bloodshed and slaughter.
"The following facts are significant. The European war is said to
cost over _one hundred million dollars_ a day in money, stoppage
of industry, and destruction of property.
"The United States has spent in preparedness for war during the
past ten years a sum six times the cost of the Panama Canal."
[Footnote: New York Peace Society Leaflet.]
The European war says:
"That a world that prepares for war will get it sooner or later.
That militarism has revealed itself as an enemy to civilization
and must be destroyed.
That autocrat rulers with power to make war have no rightful place
in the modern world. That no more attempts at world domination are
wanted, no matter by what nation or race.
That nationality and national boundaries must be respected,
territories being enlarged only by the free consent of the
population to be annexed, and colonization taking place only by
peaceable commercial and industrial methods.
That, while military preparedness cannot preserve peace,
_preparedness against attack_ is essential.
That a league or federation of the peaceably inclined nations for
mutual protection and for the preservation of international law
and order has become a necessity of the immediate future.
That lasting peace may be secured through the development of
international law, the extension of democracy, and the cultivation
of the spirit of international justice and good will."
Home Missionary women must assume their full share in all efforts
to spread illuminating information on this subject, and through
their personal attitude, thinking, and praying, strive for the
establishment of world relations that will make for peace.
The destruction of homes, hunger, sickness, poverty, degradation,
all fall heavily upon women and their helpless little ones.
When the guns have ceased their work of death and the ruined land
turns to rebuild its broken commerce and industry, it is the
children who must grow up under the privations and the stunting
burdens of fearful taxation. From the cradle to the grave, they
must pay the billions of treasure eaten up by devastating,
destroying war.
Let every Home Missionary woman, to whom this land is dear, who
cherishes father, husband, son or brother, who clings to loved
home and precious children, use all her influence to bring in the
day when the Christ standard shall be the standard for all our
national and international relations.
O bells, to-day let warfare cease!
Christ came to be a Prince of Peace.
No longer let the sound of drum
Or trumpet, campward calling, come
To vex the earth with dread, and make
The hearts of wives and mothers ache.
Leave battle flags to moths and dust--
Let sword and gun grow red with rust!
Earth groaned with carnage--let it cease--
Ring in the thousand years of Peace!
Ring out the littleness of things,
Ring in the broader thought that brings
Swift end to all ignoble creeds.
Ring in an age of noble deeds
For all things pure, and high, and good--
The era of true brotherhood.
Ring out the lust for gold and gain--
The greed that cripples soul and brain,
And open eyes, long blind, to see
What grander, better things there be!
[Footnote: Eben Rexford.]
Home Missions is one of the greatest contributors to national
righteousness. Through it the higher life of the community is
developed in the formative period; through it belated peoples
receive the spiritual transforming dynamic that makes them reach
up to the higher and better in their surroundings and gives them
a developing effectiveness and efficiency.
It brings the same force with greater power into the lives of the
children, giving them also a training of minds and hands that
equips them for an enlarging sphere of usefulness.
It brings the most telling force possible to the upward struggle
of our primitive and dependent people, patiently leading them by
the road of sympathetic understanding into some strength to stand
amidst the overpowering complexity of the civilization that
surrounds them, in which they as yet are not advanced enough to
become more than a problem.
The Negro and Indian testify to the marvelous transforming power
of the Gospel of Christ brought by Home Missions--a power that gives
moral fiber, a wholesome attitude of life in which work and ambition
have place.
To all that is noblest, highest and best in our national life, Home
Missions has given in large measure.
Home Missions faces forward, realizing that infinitely greater
responsibility and service must now enter into the mission of the
church at home, if this country is to remain Christian itself and
be a force for Christianity in the world.
II
A RECLAIMING FORCE
"Go ye and teach the next one whom you meet--
Man, woman, child, at home or on the street--
That 'God so loved them' each in thought so sweet
He could not have them lost through sin's defeat,
But sent you with His message to repeat That pardon
through His Son might be complete.
So shall our land be saved from sore defeat
And gather with the nations at His feet."
* * * * *
Referring to the incident when the disciples, James and John,
confronted by the lame man at the gate Beautiful of the Temple,
gave him restored health through the power of the Christ, instead
of the alms which he solicited, Dr. John Henry Jowett said: "He,
the Master, gave fundamentally to those in need. He did not attend to
the symptoms, but cured the disease. He gave capacity for incapacity,
ability for inability, life for feebleness. He strengthened the
wills of those born impotent and gave them the power of self-control.
"As Christ gave fundamentally in His earthly ministry, so He has
given since. It is still the greatest mission of the church to
reach and restore--to give "capacity."
Christ said, "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you." It can never
come in society, it can never prevail in a nation, until it has
first come into individual lives and found expression through
them.
"All true progress," says the Hon. James Bryce, "has always been
from the soul working outward through men's acts, and it is so to-day."
Home Missions has pre-eminently been the agent of the church in
this fundamental work of reclamation. Let us go to the laboratory
of the Mission fields where we may see Home Missions in action,
and witness the Christ power to restore, uplift, transform, to
give capacity.
* * * * *
It was a crisp day in early autumn when the visitor from the
Women's Board stepped from the train at a small station in
Northern Minnesota and was met by the Home Missionary pastor.
A pair of strong horses and a light buggy made quick work of the
ten-mile drive, to the new mission church at M---- L----.
It was through what might be termed new country--so new that the
stumps of the recently demolished forest were still standing, seared
and slashed remnants of the splendid trees.
The first crop raised by ploughing the rich earth between the stumps
stood tall and full of the promise of marvelous productiveness when
suitable cultivation was possible. It was one of the crude frontier
towns of the Northwest.
Several Old World kingdoms had contributed to the population.
There were Norwegians, Swedes, Hollanders, a few Poles, and some
Americans of the sort who perennially move on, hoping for better
conditions.
The lives of the people were filled with heaviest toil, for they
were conquering a new country. They were renters of the land, or
had bought with heavy mortgages, and so their ceaseless struggle
was to gain a foothold. Little time or thought had they for the
claims of the higher life.
There was no reminder of the things of God in the town save a
Catholic chapel. To many of the people this faith was most repugnant.
There was no Sabbath, though for some the day's toil was not quite so
arduous. The saloon, with its warmth and brightness, lured the tired
men with the promise of sociability at all times.
Among them, however, was a man who had been an elder in a Protestant
church across the seas, and he realized what the godlessness of the
little place would mean to them all, and especially its effect upon
the lives of their little children.
He sought the help of a Home Missionary whose duties covered a
district of hundreds of miles, and to whom was entrusted the
establishing of new fields.
When his work called him to that part of Minnesota, he visited
M---- L----, holding services in the little district school building,
visiting in the homes and doing what he could in a brief stay to
rouse and help them spiritually.
As he was able, he returned to them several times during the year.
How gladly did those welcome him who in the old homes had followed
after the things of God!
In the summer he arranged to have a student missionary commissioned
to the field. In due time the student arrived, spending the four
months of his seminary vacation among them.
He was an indefatigable worker. Soon the little schoolhouse was
most uncomfortably crowded with those who were drawn by the singing
and the bright _go_ of the meetings.
Services were then held out of doors, the congregation seated on
improvised benches of boards laid across tree trunks.
The student organized and superintended a Sunday-school--gathered
the young people into an Endeavor Society. He formed a singing
class--a portable baby organ which he played was their only musical
instrument.
He arranged games, socials, and picnics; one of the latter, a
berry-picking picnic, the proceeds of which, twelve dollars, was
given to missions.
So close did he bring religion to these people, so desirable he
made it, that they became eager for a permanent church. A very
little help was given by the Board toward the purchase of the
land, and the people attended to the building.
The men quarried and hauled the foundation stone; they secured and
dressed the timber, and with the labor of their own hands the little
church was built before the student returned, and later, beside it,
the Women's Board helping, a tiny parsonage was placed.
Then came an energetic, devoted Home Missionary to live the Gospel,
day by day, as well as preach it; to incorporate Christian ideals
into the daily thinking of these people, and Christian purposes
into their controlling motives; to make them understand that the
Gospel means honesty in business, cleanness of heart and body,
health and enlightenment, and whatever makes life worthy here
and now and fits it for the future beyond.
Thousands of such homely frontier missions are molding the
citizenship which makes the very life of the Republic.
All honor to the men and women of character and ability who, as
Home Missionaries, are devoting their lives to such fields--the
most difficult in the world--where no picturesqueness of scenes
or people relieves the strain--where sordid sin, monotony, crudity,
and newness prevail, but where the returns in character-building
contribute to the life of a nation whose mission is the world.
* * * * *
The following quaint letter was written by Rev. Aratus Kent, a
Congregational Missionary at Galena, Ill., to the Congregational
Home Missionary Society under date of April 9, 1844:
"When I came to Galena (in 1829), there was not any church or
clergyman within two hundred miles, and I used to say that my
parish extended from Rock River to Wisconsin. Now I can count
within these bounds twenty-five churches and fifteen ministers.
"Let those then who think little of the influences of the Home
Missionary Society blot out of being those twenty-five churches,
and drive out of the state those fifteen clergymen, and disband
fifty Sabbath-schools, and burn a thousand Bibles, and recall a
thousand volumes of the Tract Society, and stop the monthly visit
of a tract to five hundred houses, and give back a drunken father
to fifty families that are now rejoicing in the peace and plenty
consequent upon their regeneration." And yet this work of
vandalism is not done until you have taken back that stream of
heavenly influence which has gone forth from this district to
bless the heathen in our forests and the heathen beyond the ocean,
and until you have recalled that company of young men who have
gone away for the ministry.
"We need within this field more missionaries who can endure
privations, and who, to meet their appointments, can face a
prairie storm and buffet a swollen stream, and who, like their
Divine Master, can take the mountain top for their study and the
midnight hour for the season of their devotion.
"We want also assistance here in the West to establish literary
(educational) institutions upon the right basis, and if the
professors of the East would come and see what I see, they would
court the honor of contribution to establish the female seminary
in Galena which was yesterday projected, and which is next week
to commence its existence. This church has sustained a German
colporter during the winter."
* * * * *
About a little valley in the Southland stand mountains grim and
forbidding in their rugged beauty--holding close within their
bounds those who for generations had found their scanty living
upon the sterile mountain sides and in the richer valleys, saying
No! to the pressing outside world, with its progress and its
change.
Many winters and summers passed over the settlement of J----, on
---- creek, forty miles from all railroads, shut in by laurel-covered
hills and pine mountains; its people, of fine pioneer ancestry and
deeply religious, thrown back upon themselves through segregation
and isolation, had lost much of the initiative and force that
characterized their ancestors, and had crystallized along the
lines of their peculiarities, as any people will under the same
conditions.
Up the creek and into the valley one day there came two "foreign"
women from the great world beyond. They were Home Missionaries,
but did not use this designation for fear the mountain people
might not understand that they came simply as friends to bring
to the valley the _opportunity_ America gives to her children.
They found the people simple folk, ignorant, but with no touch of
vulgarity. Their eyes saw no opening beyond the blue shadows of
the enveloping mountains. To a few the longing to _know_, or that
their children might have a "_chance_," hung like a star afar off,
but with little hope of attainment.
A dark fatalism presided over their destinies. "What is to be will
be, I reckon," summed up their philosophy.
About many of them appeared an atmosphere of the unconscious moral
heroism that willingly gives its all to meet whatever the day may
bring of privation, hardship, suffering, or death.
The valley folk were very suspicious of the two friends at first,
and curious about them in a shy, kindly way.
Why had they come? What were their real motives? Did they mean only
good to the valley? It took many months of devoted service on the
part of the women to answer these queries.
Did sickness ravage some home where many little ones were crowded
into two or three rooms? Was some man crushed by the heavy logs
while at work? There the nurse friend came with her comforts and
her skill to fight for the life of the sufferers, to watch beside
them during the long, chill nights of pain--to pray that the
healing power of the Christ might be manifested.
The two friends found that the valley had no Sunday-school or
regular preaching service to mark the Lord's day. Occasionally an
itinerant preacher held meetings, but Sunday after Sunday came and
went in the valley with no religious service whatever.
They found that the children received but poor schooling, and
little or no training for life.
They found mothers who knew only the monotony of drudgery and were
eager to share in the fuller life.
They found the wide use of corn whisky to be sapping the moral and
physical strength of the men, and that everywhere among them
lawlessness prevailed, even though some were anxious for better
things.
Through the love-service of the two friends and those who followed
them, and the co-operation of the people, the valley to-day is
transformed even in its outward appearance.
Drinking has disappeared except in sporadic cases. Lawlessness is
under ban. A great, throbbing, new life has come to stimulate and
inspire not only the valley, but its environs.
Here the reclaiming power of Christian service meets with fullest
response. A church and Sunday-school (also four outlying schools),
men's Bible classes, several Endeavor Societies and King's Daughters'
Circles, Boy Scouts, Girls' clubs--the ministry of a hospital, schools
and dormitories, all are spreading the regenerating forces and bringing
in a new day of hope, opportunity, and efficiency to this valley, and
to hundreds of others throughout the Southland.
* * * * *
All along the fine military road built by Spain in Porto Rico--and
still more on the bridle paths that pass for roads in much of the
island--may be seen little brown shacks, or huts, made of old
boards and tin cans flattened out, and thatched with palm leaves.
In these the people live.
"We had sixty names on the waiting list of the Missionary Home in
Porto Rico, and money had come so we could take in a few more, and
we--the superintendent and I--went to try to find the most needy.
Our search took us into a dreadful, slimy patio, where we found a
grandmother and three little girls. We could take but two of them.
The oldest was thirteen--we knew she would soon be too old to be
helped at all if we did not take her now. The second was under ten,
and the youngest was three and a half. We could not bear to leave
the dead mother's baby, so we took the oldest and the youngest, and
promised the second girl that we would come for her as soon as possible.
They lived in a room nine by twelve feet in size, in which twenty-two
people slept under some old clothes. Do you wonder that she fell on
her knees begging 'Oh, lady, take me, too!'"
"The next day the grandmother was taken ill and had to be sent to
the hospital, and on Tuesday when I went to the patio again the
girl had disappeared.
"Three months later we found her, beaten and bruised from head to
foot, at the door of the Home. She had been in a place where care
and shelter were expected, but when the poor, home-sick girl cried,
they abused her and then put her out on the street, and somehow she
found her way to our Home.
"You would enjoy seeing how quickly the girls in our Home learn
to help each other. Mercedes had been in the Home but ten days when
Francesca came--a bit of a waif who had never worn shoes in all her life,
nor seen a bed before. Of course she knew nothing about undressing and
sleeping between clean, white sheets. She tried to do like the others,
but got into bed with her precious new shoes and stockings on. Mercedes
watched her, and when ready herself, slipped across the room, whispered
to Francesca, took off her shoes and stockings, pushed her--but very
gently--down on her knees for the evening prayer, and then covered
her up in bed as softly and lovingly as a mother." [Footnote: In
Southern Seas--Alice M. Guernsey--Women's Home Missionary Society,
Methodist Episcopal Church.]
* * * * *
With soft, Insistent regularity came the beat of the tom-tom over
the hills, calling the Indians to the Medicine Lodge dance. There
was something weirdly fascinating in the reiterated turn, turn,
that carried almost a hypnotic power as hour after hour it called
through the stillness.
Wrapped in their bright blankets--men on horseback--whole families in
wagons--the Indians passed round the curve of the road, to disappear
in the big, open depression just beyond, where the Medicine Lodge was
in camp. There was a group of rounded tents in which families and guests
were prepared to live the four days and nights during which the rites
of the dance lasted. It was an untidy and disorderly camp, with children
and dogs tumbling about--women kneeling to arrange small strips of meat
to cook over the bit of wood fire on the ground, or attending to other
home-keeping matters. Dirt, flies, children, and dogs were everywhere.
A few feet away stretched the long tent where the ceremony of the
dance was to take place. They had taken their places and were
ready for the ceremony--mostly men, a few women, a little girl of
nine years, a young mother of twenty whose baby two weeks old was
held by an aged grandmother, who crouched at the end.
All were dressed in beaded finery. All wore moccasins--some men
had long beaded stoles--others wonderful beaded waistcoats. The
women wore long beaded hair ornaments reaching almost to the
ground, as well as strings of beads and other ornaments.
The faces of nearly all were marked with spots of bright red or
long streaks of yellow and red. The same color was used in the
parting of the hair.