For a venture which seemed to us problematical in its outcome, we did
not dare to borrow money or to induce friends to invest; and of course
Mission funds were not available. For the day has not yet arrived when
all those who seek by their gifts to hasten the coming of the Kingdom
of God on earth recognize that to give the opportunity to men to
provide decently for their families and homes is as effective work for
the Master, whose first attribute was love, as patching up the
unfortunate victims of semi-starvation. The inculcation of the
particular intellectual conception which the donor may hold of
religion, or as to how, after death, the soul can get into heaven, is,
as the result of the Church teaching, still considered far the most
important line of effort. The emphasis on hospitals is second, partly
at least because, so it has seemed to me as a doctor of medicine, the
more obvious personal benefit thereby conferred renders the recipients
more impressionable to the views considered desirable to promulgate.
Yet only to-day, as I came home from our busy operating-room, I felt
how little real gain the additional time on earth often is either to
the world outside or even to the poor sufferers themselves. In order
to have one's early teachings on these matters profoundly shaken, one
has only to work as a surgeon in a country where tuberculosis,
beri-beri, and other preventable diseases, and especially the chronic
malnutrition of poverty fills your clinic with suffering children, who
at least are victims and not responsible spiritually for their
"punishment." Of course, the magnitude of service to the world of
every act of unselfishness, and much more of whole lives of devotion,
such as that of Miss Sullivan, the teacher of Miss Helen Keller, can
never be rightly estimated by any purely material conception of human
life.
Love is dangerously near to sentimentality when we actually prefer
remedial to prophylactic charity--and I personally feel that it is
false economy even from the point of view of mission funds. The
industrial mission, the educational mission, and the orphanage work at
least rank with and should go hand in hand with hospitals in any true
interpretation of a gospel of love.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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