Read Ebook: Home Missions in Action by Allen Edith H Edith Hedden

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Ebook has 627 lines and 38057 words, and 13 pages

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 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."

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.

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."

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."

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."

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 United States has spent in preparedness for war during the past ten years a sum six times the cost of the Panama Canal."

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 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!

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.

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."

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