The figures are appalling in respect of child-marriages. The census of 1901 showed 121,500 married boys and 243,500 married girls, whose age was under five: 760,000 boys and 2,030,000 girls between the ages of five and ten; 2,540,000 and 6,586,000 between ten and fifteen. Of these, all except a certain number of girls under the last class were married before they were able to realize what marriage is. The most deplorable result of such marriages is seen in the number of widowed children; 6,000 widowers and 96,000 widows were between five and ten; 113,000 widowers and 276,000 widows between ten and fifteen. [Sidenote: The homes of the world need Christ.] [Sidenote: Three methods of bringing Christ to needy homes.] The homes of the world need nothing so much as the presence and blessing of the Christ who brought cheer to the home in Cana, comfort to the widow’s home at Nain, resurrection and life to the home at Bethany, vision to the home in Emmaus. How are _we_ to help to make it possible that fathers, mothers, and children in homes where He is not known should hear Him as He stands at the door and knocks, and shall open to Him that He may sup with them and they with Him? There are at least three practical methods by which Christian women may help to bring about this result. _First_: Through Christian schools which take children and youth in their impressionable years and train them to be the Christian fathers and mothers of the future. We have briefly alluded to this method and shall speak of it more at length in a later chapter. _Second_: In Zenana work and other forms of visiting in the homes, in crowded cities, and isolated villages, taking to each individual home the story of the Christ who gathered the little ones in His arms, and the practical, homely lessons of efforts that Christian civilization is making in behalf of home life. _Third_: Through the great object lesson, the missionary home. Never again let it be asked in church or missionary society of a young woman starting for the foreign field, “Are you going out as a missionary, or only as a missionary’s wife?” At a conference for outgoing missionaries, a beautiful, talented college graduate, leader in many activities and full of capacity and consecration, said to a returned missionary,--“I am to be married, and have listened and listened at this conference to know what particular work is waiting for me, but there has been _nothing_ for me as yet.” When it was pointed out to her that by means of her paramount duties and obligations as wife and mother in a missionary home she would have an opportunity of _living_ the missionary message such as few of her fellow missionaries might have, her beautiful face lighted up with a look that illumined it. The making of a missionary home was a vocation indeed to call forth all the highest powers of her consecrated womanhood. [Sidenote: E. A. Lawrence on missionary homes.]