Poor -- New York (State) -- New York; Social settlements
When sickness enters the home of the poor man, money is not present to
relieve the able from personal service, often made more difficult through
ignorance. Pride shuts the door to charity and the burden is carried in
love. Those who know life at this level can never, never lose faith in the
Eternal love, for they see always, however disguised, the divine spark in
every human being. The silence of love thus expressed, the revelation of it
where least expected, makes the one who witnesses it conscious of what
power lies outside and beyond and above his own life, not witnessed to the
ear. Every day at this level of life in our great city it is proved to the
privileged that tenderness is the winning element in strength; that love
daily, hourly here proves its power of self-abnegation. Here, too, it fills
its function of inspiration. Days, weeks, months, years go by and the
burden of moral weakness is borne with the cloak of faith wrapped about its
fears. When so expressed, its loyal unconsciousness adds to its beauty and
makes it an inspiration to all who come into its presence as friends; the
lips voice its faith, the eyes alone reveal its fears even to friends.
[Illustration: THE MORNING AIRING OF AN EAST SIDE HEIRESS.]
The more intimately one comes into the home circle of the independent
wage-earners the more clearly does the disadvantages of wealth stand
revealed. Life must be lived so simply, the interests of life are so
evident, that the value of words decreases; action expresses the heart
perfectly. The very services the children render each other train them for
the family life they will establish. The baby tended by an older brother
and sister learns to depend on them for care, and that dependence in turn
draws out a love and responsibility that could not have birth under any
other conditions. The child who finds that in pain, weariness, suffering, a
father and mother alone share its care; the elder children who see how
naturally sacrifices are made for them, how little the father and mother
value themselves, their ease, even their comfort, learn to value the love
in the home and depend on it, give love to it, that money to buy service
would bar out. The child who sees parents make sacrifices to enlarge his
opportunities for education, seeing him as a positive factor in his own
manhood, sees more than parental love in such sacrifices and stands in more
than the relation of child to parents.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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