Home Missions in ActionAllen, Edith H. (Edith Hedden)
History
Home Missions in Action
Allen, Edith H. (Edith Hedden)
Home missions
The deaconess will do her utmost for his rescue, but we cannot
wonder at her feeling that great fundamental, preventive measures
must be taken by the church and society to wipe out the city slums
and all that they stand for of pestilential evil.
Of great significance are the disintegrating efforts of certain groups
of socialists and anarchists who by means of Sunday-schools gather
children of immigrants largely to inculcate in them the peculiar
principles and doctrines of anarchism and their brand of socialism,
as well as to crush out of their thought all idea of God and love
and obedience to Him. These Sunday-schools, so destructive of all
that is best and highest in the child soul, flourish in New York,
Brooklyn, Chicago and other large cities.
* * * * *
The foreigners who stand perhaps in greatest need of the
understanding sympathy and the harmonizing influence of the church
are those isolated in the great mining regions, where the conditions
of living are so hazardous and where maladjustments of every sort
contribute to an atmosphere which breathes of hatred and discontent.
It is estimated that our present industrial system, through criminal
negligence, takes the huge toll of 45,000 workers killed every year.
One miner of every hundred dies because his employer cares less
for the lives of his men than for the few extra dollars, the cost
of proper safety arrangements.
"In the course of the Pittsburgh survey it was discovered that by
industrial accidents Allegheny County alone loses more than five
hundred workmen every year, sixty per cent of whom are young men
who have not yet reached the prime of life. This loss falls not
upon the people who determine the degree of protection from injury
and decide about the introduction of safety devices, but upon the
widows, the orphans and the aged parents."
Here the resourceful Home Missionary is an inestimable help. She
is often a Slavish or Bohemian girl, knowing from actual experience
all the sordidness, the monotony, the tragedy that envelop the mine
and its workers, for in many cases she herself has been a part of it,
herself Christianized, educated and trained by Home Missions. She
speaks the language of the mines, she knows its innermost life. When
the frequent accidents, throw their desolation and fearful economic
burdens upon the homes, she comforts and sustains. She helps the
stricken wife and children to keep to decency and right. She teaches
night classes in English, and mothers' classes, sustains reading and
club rooms with games and wholesome amusements to hold the boy miner
from the lure of the saloon. She conducts the Sunday-school and is
herself a peripatetic Christian settlement, with all that it implies
of sacrifice, service and the salvation of soul and body.
A commentary on the need of Home Missions in the mining sections
is forcibly presented in the following testimony.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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