02.10. Woman's Work in Home Evangelization

X. WOMAN’S WORK IN HOME EVANGELIZATION.

I LIVE close beside the great gates of the West through which multitudes of the children of the East pass in long procession to the ripe fields beyond. Every day trains laden with immigrant families from European countries roll over the great bridge of the Mississippi, and emigrant wagons with their white canvas covering the home treasures, from the Eastern States, journey leisurely past my windows: both tides alike, home and foreign, with their faces set towards new homes far out on the great plains.

These things constantly keep the thought and necessity of home missionary work m mind and heart, and it comes by force into my daily prayer. I little thought in early years to have spent so much of my life amidst such scenes; but it may have been so in God’s Providence that I might appeal, with more directness and effectiveness, to my sisters that remain in the East in behalf of this great work. Seeing is believing. If you could look through my eyes I am sure your heart would be stirred with an impulse that would not let you slumber in the face of these demands upon us.

These emigrants come in families. Each family is a hive of bright-faced, interesting children. Our American families, as well as foreign families that move West, abound in vigorous, healthy children — boys and girls to be guided and instructed in good ways. It is a sight to awaken the deep heart-yearnings of any Christian mother. For these children are on their way to homes as yet unmade, and to communities unfurnished with Christian institutions and influences, and which often abound with snares and pitfalls for tender feet. Hence the pressing need of ministers and churches in these places of spiritual destitution, that the family altars may be set up in the homes, the children gathered into Sunday-schools, and taught the way of life. Here is a strong appeal to mothers to work for home missions. Other countries, except the Catholic, are not sending missionaries to us. If we neglect our own country, there are none to care for it. You look at your own children in their comfortable homes with every advantage of Christian culture, and the contrast is appalling; and you say, “Important as my sphere of usefulness is at home, I cannot stop with my own children; my duty is as wide as the opening fields” — for the mother’s power must reach wherever the children go. The work is not now so much to strengthen the weak churches as to provide shepherds for these incoming flocks.

Multitudes of children in the older States are destined to make their homes and spend their lives on these new fields. From every neighborhood in the East some young men have gone out of your homes to the frontiers; great numbers of your sons and daughters are sure to follow. What better work can possibly be done than to seek to evangelize these fields, and to brighten the atmosphere with Christian light and love for the future welfare of these children? Their own children will be born there; their lives will be passed there. There they will be buried. We need to lay the foundation of many generations now, to begin to build such institutions as we are willing to have our children spend their lives in. If we commence they will complete the work, and carry it still farther on after we are gone.

How much depends on right beginnings! Much has been said, and truly so, concerning the rapid and luxuriant growths of these Western prairies. It is no less true that the seed of divine truth has been equally rapid in its growth, and the yield abundant in places where it has been sown. It is especially within the power of the Christian women to aid in this work of sending the gospel missionary to these fields. They may appeal to every element in the community around them. Other forms of missionary work may reach separate classes only. This affects all classes. Each person in the church and out of it may be asked for aid, according to their means, to build up Christian institutions in the new West. It is in the interest of business, of capital, of good order, of labor, of education, of the family, and home and country. It is in the interest of the life eternal.

There is some diversity of opinion as to methods of organization among Christian women. Whoever is a member of the church of Christ belongs to the best organization in the world for Christian work. The family is the divine unit, and in God’s order we are households for the Lord, and ordained to work church-wise together — men, women, and children, and the stranger within our gates. This, certainly, can be done. Christian ladies in every church can make, in behalf of home missions, an annual canvass of the entire parish, visiting every person, subscription paper in hand, in place of the meagre basket collections, and thereby double and triple the amount now raised. This is a very simple way; but when fifteen or twenty ladies systematize the work in a parish, and go for the last dollar for the great home missionary cause, they will return laden with bountiful offerings.

We must read God’s purpose and our duty in this swelling tide of foreign population to this great West land. From my childhood I have been taught to reverence and love the work of foreign missions; and all the ardor I have felt for the multitudes abroad lost in sin, now kindles in my soul for these whom God is sending to my own land, past my own door. I see in it God’s plan to warm these cold hearts at our firesides, and to feed these hungry souls from our own loaf of life. As we draw the living water for ourselves, we must draw it also for these parents and their children.