Aliens or Americans?Grose, Howard B. (Howard Benjamin)
Religion
Aliens or Americans?
Grose, Howard B. (Howard Benjamin)
Noncitizens -- United States; United States -- Emigration and immigration
"We need young men and young women to go down among these people and
live Christian lives in the midst of them. I do not believe that any
one should take his children there to rear them. But young men in
groups, or young women in groups, or young couples without children, who
are able to earn their own living could contribute greatly to the
solution of these problems if they would live among these foreigners and
help in the process of digestion and assimilation. And there is nothing
that can do that work so quickly and effectually as for Christian men
and women to dwell among these people, as Christ once left his home on
high to dwell among the sinful ones of earth. And if there are young men
and young women who are willing to give themselves wholly to work for
these people, and will live among them, and seek by the power of divine
grace to lift them up, it surely is very little for you and me to
sustain them while they toil."
[Sidenote: How the Work Grows]
Wherever earnest effort has been put forth, the progress of the work has
been most encouraging. As an illustration of this, when Dr. H. A.
Schauffler some twenty years ago began his pioneer missionary work among
the 25,000 Bohemians of Cleveland, he could not learn of any
fellow-laborers in the Slavic field except a Bohemian theological
student in New York, a Bohemian Reformed Church pastor in Iowa,
and another in Texas. But in 1905 there met in Chicago an
Interdenominational Conference of Slavic missionaries and pastors, and
that gathering comprised no less than 103 Slavic workers, of whom
sixty-four were pastors and preachers, fourteen women missionaries, and
twenty-five missionary students; while the conference represented
forty-nine churches in thirteen states, and five evangelical
denominations. Mr. Ives says truly: "It has been forever established
that foreigners are as convertible as our own people, that in many
instances their faith is more pure and evangelical than the American
type, that their lives are transformed by its power to an extent that
sometimes puts the American Christian to shame, that their children are
easily gathered into Sunday-schools, their young people into Endeavor
Societies, and their men and women into prayer-meetings, where in many
different tongues they yet speak and pray in the language of Canaan. The
immigration problem is not the same menace that it was. A mighty solvent
has been found."
[Sidenote: Inspiring Difficulties]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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