God's Answers: A Record of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada — John Shaqi
God's Answers: A Record of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in CanadaLowe, Clara M. S.
Religion
God's Answers: A Record of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada
Lowe, Clara M. S.
Canada -- Emigration and immigration; Church work with children; Home missions; Macpherson, Annie
"Within easy reach of this house stood a much smaller one, built by
the owner of the farm for himself and his wife to retire to whenever
their eldest son should choose a bride and undertake the farm. This I
have seen elsewhere in Canada and have also known the heir of the
property to go out for the day helping at another farm, where no
labourer could be found in the neighbourhood. No contrast could be
greater to one coming from the sight of the constant distress in the
crowded East of London,--distress arising from want of work, food,
light, air, and room to live and breathe in, and the comfort here
beheld and experienced through the abundance of all; the pure fresh
air, the sight of 'God's blessings growing out of our mother earth,'
the ground ready to bestow so rich a return for all the labour
bestowed on it, and the only want that of the human hands--the hands
that, in our own land, are to be had so easily, that human beings are
expected to work like machines, and human frames are used as though
made of brass or iron."
Miss Macpherson was not permitted to remain many days quietly at
Belleville. The call came for her to go farther into Western Canada,
and this eventually resulted in the establishing of the Home at Galt.
The journey is thus described in her own words:--
"Believing that our gift was to pioneer, we left our dear friends
embosomed at Marchmont among the bursting maple trees in loveliest
spring-time. At early dawn on May 23rd we started, with a party of
twenty of our boys of different ages, for Woodstock and Embro, a
district of country where thousands of Scotch families have settled,
and where there has been a wave of blessing from the Lord, through
the faithful preaching of evangelists in the past year. Therefore we
longed to 'spy' the land, not so much to gain an increase of dollars
or more cultivated land for our boys, but our object was to find
hearts that had been awakened to newness of life; and we trusted that
with such our children would be nourished by the sincere milk of the
Word, and grow thereby into godly men and faithful witnesses of the
Lord Jesus."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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