[Sidenote: A leprous mother.] A leprous mother, outcast of society, doomed to spend the rest of her life in a leper village and to drag out a miserable existence among those who are afflicted and suffering like herself! What, oh what, shall she do with her children, as yet untainted by the frightful disease, but sure to develop it if they too go to the leper village? And yet who is there in the wide world to care for her little ones? Her husband is up at the village, hands gone, sightless eyes, disfigured face,--he cannot help. No relatives or neighbors will be bothered with the children of the outcast, and yet that mother heart beats with an intense, despairing mother love as yours or mine might,--with a love that can bear all suffering and even slow death for herself if only her children are safe. Hark, a neighbor calls to her from a safe distance,--“Do you know that those foreign Jesus people have a place where they take the children of those who are accursed of God like yourself? They take them and feed them and teach them their Jesus religion and train them to earn their living.” Oh, it is the one word of hope and courage, the one ray of light in utter darkness, and the little children are left on the threshold of the Home for Untainted Children, and the leper mother learns of a Home where she herself may go and where she and her husband may receive loving care and unheard-of comfort, and where the years of suffering are illumined by the knowledge of another Home where she may meet her darlings once more, and “where the inhabitant shall not say, I am sick.” [Sidenote: Homes for untainted children of lepers.] “Twenty-one Homes for the untainted children of leprous parents in which about five hundred boys and girls are being brought up to healthy and useful lives and saved from adding to the terrible total of diseased outcasts,”[49] this is the record of the work of Christian missions thus far. Compare with it the record of what in this modern day has been done in the name of an attempt at civilization which leaves Christianity entirely out of account. [Sidenote: In the name of civilization, but without Christianity.] “Wellesley G. Bailey of Edinburgh, the superintendent of the Mission to Lepers, has received authoritative information concerning the terrible massacre of lepers by government soldiers which was perpetrated at the city of Nanning, the remote capital of the province Kwang-si in southern China. The massacre was instituted under the direct orders of the governor general of the province.... In this case the offense of his cruelty is aggravated by the fact that, taking advantage of the trend to modern ideas in China, the vicious old general pretended to be acting in the interest of scientific hygiene. The excuse he has made for the massacre is that leprosy is a great menace to humanity and the destruction of those afflicted with it is the surest way of stamping out the scourge....