Poor -- New York (State) -- New York; Social settlements
One evening, going through the audience room of this building on an errand
to the rear room, the visitor heard one of the women missionaries say to a
little girl who had evidently been troublesome and inattentive: "If you
don't sit still, Mollie, I'll come there and shake you until you'll be glad
to sit still." The woman was training a group of little girls to take part
in a Christmas entertainment. They were each to recite a verse and turn a
gold paper-covered letter as they recited, so that when the last one had
spoken her verse the sentence "Glory to God in the highest, peace on earth
and good-will to men" would be revealed. The woman, in temper, language,
conception of her duty to these children, differed in nowise from their
ignorant, tired, worried mothers at home, who probably made no claim as a
teacher of morals and religion. What ideals of womanhood did this woman
represent?
A minister came to attend the funeral of a little baby in a surplice so
soiled and rumpled that a friend of the mother, who was a good laundress,
said afterward: "I wish he'd given me that yesterday morning. I would have
washed and ironed it." "He wouldn't have worn it if it had been a rich
man's child," was the little mother's response. "Well, he acted like his
surplice, rumpled," said the first speaker. And the writer was struck with
the perfect characterization of the man's manner.
Fortunately, there are men who see the divine in every human being; who
know that sorrow, grief, shame and suffering bear as cruelly, as bitterly
on the poor as the rich, and in their ministration know no difference
between them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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