The American Missionary — Volume 41, No. 1, January, 1887Various
Religion
The American Missionary — Volume 41, No. 1, January, 1887
Various
Congregational churches -- Missions -- Periodicals; Home missions -- Periodicals
After the abolition of slavery there remained that other relic
of barbarism, entrenched in a far more impregnable position, the
rum-power. Intemperance has had to meet many who have attacked it
in past days, but never yet an organization so tireless in effort,
so fertile in expedients, and so exhaustless in resources as the
Women’s Christian Temperance Union. That association has made many
mistakes, and is in danger of making many more, but one of the
elements of its power is its willingness to learn. If it cannot
fight with one weapon it adopts another. The brewers and distillers
have millions of money at their command, but millions of money are
not so formidable as millions of motherly hearts.
If now we turn to that other evil, more subtly and surely ruinous
even than intemperance, impurity and the social evil, we find a new
organization rising with great promise of power, viz.: The White
Cross Society. The aim of that Association is to promote purity. It
reaches out its hands to young men and women alike, and that work,
in its organized form, owes its existence to the fertile brain
and motherly heart of Josephine Butler, the wife of a canon of an
English cathedral.
If woman works for the salvation of the physical life of her
brothers and sisters, of course she must be equally anxious for
the salvation of their souls. Woman has an instinct for religion.
Living a life of greater seclusion than man, her heart in the
silence, like a flower in the darkness, has grown toward the light.
And this spiritual faculty has found the natural field for its
operations in missionary work. The first American missionary martyr
was Harriet Newell. Grand as was the life, and courageous as was
the heart of Adoniram Judson, in all that called for heroism and
consecration he was surpassed by his first wife, the beautiful, the
almost preternaturally heroic Ann Hasseltine.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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