Edith H. Allen

“ Almost half a mile from the Medicine Lodge camp, on a rise of ground, stands a little Christian church—plain but beautiful. From it seem to flow visibly those purifying and redeeming forces that are destined to transform the darkened lives of these Indian children of the great All-father.
It is prayer-meeting night. The bell is rung and the audience begins to gather. A number of alert, intelligent-looking, English-speaking young men come in together. ”

“ Through travel, cultural influences, commerce, the rapid circulation of news, the cultivation of sympathy, there is a recognized oneness of the world to-day; a solidarity which, notwithstanding all the differences arising from remoteness, race, legislation, and religion, binds together the world as never before.
The world is realizing to-day, as one of the results of this conflict, that in the largest sense its interests are one, and that all nations are interdependent.
"America must remember that the military idea and the ideal of democracy are absolutely opposed." ”

“ I am confident that a new era is dawning—an era marked by intellectual development and religious awakening, an era of questioning, an era of intelligence. This cannot fail to be effective in breaking up the crust of dogmatism and superstition which has retarded the independent religious thinking of these people for many years. ”

“ The transforming of a continent from a wilderness to a land of homes and highly organized industry in the brief space of three centuries; the marvelous and rapid development of the vast material resources of our land; the hastening here of eager recruits from other lands, passionately seeking and needing material betterment, have magnified in this country the feverish acquisition of material wealth and accentuated the hard, calculating business spirit ”

“ In lumber sections, in mining camps, on Alaskan river boats, in far back mountain settlements, in the patios of Porto Rico and our island possessions, with the Negroes of the South, the Orientals of the Pacific coast, the backward peoples, the Mexicans and Indians, the depressed of our great cities, at the gates of the nation—wherever the cry of human need in our land has been met by Home Missions, there these ministers of healing have carried their blessed service.
If the nurse, or deaconess, is to fulfill her mission to the sick, she must have training. ”

“ When the frequent accidents, throw their desolation and fearful economic burdens upon the homes, she comforts and sustains. She helps the stricken wife and children to keep to decency and right. She teaches night classes in English, and mothers' classes, sustains reading and club rooms with games and wholesome amusements to hold the boy miner from the lure of the saloon. She conducts the Sunday-school and is herself a peripatetic Christian settlement, with all that it implies of sacrifice, service and the salvation of soul and body. ”

“ Ringing in His every word and expressed in his every deed is the key note of His life—Love. He lived to express, to incarnate love—the love of the father for His children. We see Him turn from honor, riches, from what others value and strive for, that he might manifest His love and teach others how to love. The love of Jesus embodied more than it is possible for us to comprehend in the height and depth and fulness of its meaning. ”

“ Since the early days when Roger Williams pressed into the wilderness of Rhode Island, the Christian preacher and teacher have followed the advancing line of the successive frontiers—no hardship, no denial, no scarcity of food, no privation, no want or cold so great that Home Missions hesitated to go, with its spiritual healing, its community service, bringing the very heart of Christ's love and service into these new centers. ”

“ Action, growth, conduct, spring from the creating ideal and in the process of development they advance and enlarge together.
"The ideal is the primary moving power in the human spirit," Professor Gidding says; "into his ideal enter man's estimate of the past and his forecast of the future—his scientific analysis and his poetic feeling, his soberest judgment and his religious aspiration."
Our ideal then for our country, for the work and place of Home Missions in it, for ourselves as Christian patriots and believers in Home Missions, is essentially a basic source of power. ”

“ The deaconess nurse goes into the homes of the poor, bringing the skilled touch of the nurse and the loving heart of Christian womanhood to the service of the neediest. Contagion has no terrors for her; Filth, vermin, and dangerously unsanitary conditions are matters of every-day occurrence. No service so quickly opens the heart to good influences as that which comes in hours of deepest need and helplessness, to lead the heart through human tenderness to the Source of all goodness and love. Whole families have been won to Christ through the services of a Christian nurse. ”

“ It brings the most telling force possible to the upward struggle of our primitive and dependent people, patiently leading them by the road of sympathetic understanding into some strength to stand amidst the overpowering complexity of the civilization that surrounds them, in which they as yet are not advanced enough to become more than a problem.
The Negro and Indian testify to the marvelous transforming power of the Gospel of Christ brought by Home Missions—a power that gives moral fiber, a wholesome attitude of life in which work and ambition have place. ”

“ The reaction from the monotony of factory life, with its exacting, fatiguing tension of machine-tending, and the crowdedness of the tenement home, sends the laboring multitudes into the streets at night seeking diversion and amusement. This is pre-eminently true of the young, who find commercialism waiting at night to "extract from them their petty wages by pandering to their love of pleasure" after having utilized their undeveloped labor power in its factories and shops by day. ”

“ Death meets those myriads whilst indulging the most appalling passions—their hands filled with weapons of carnage, their hearts with fratricidal hate. It is the sense of the moral death involved, searing of conscience, deadening of heart, blunting of moral faculty, fruits of death brought forth in the soul of the survivor, which are more horrifying to the enlightened consciousness than the dying groans of the stricken can be to the more bodily nerve. ”

“ From New Orleans, with its 60,000, to New York with its nearly half a million, scarcely a city is without an Italian colony, and even villages and rural districts show a quota of these ubiquitous, hard working, promising new Americans.
Italy, the land of art and beauty, contributes to us citizens with an enormous capacity for industry and economy, warmth of nature, response to beauty and openness to religious appeal, with a tendency to crimes of passion and, in general, a most un-American attitude toward the child, using him at the earliest possible age as a commercial asset for the family. ”

“ Yes, America offers hope, a future, the upward path, to the crowding millions, but only as the light of God illumines and makes clear the way and His voice stills the hate of race and class, saying "Come unto Me," and "Bear ye one another's burdens." ”

“ Little by little the people came out of their holes in the earth and built themselves houses. The community has been physically and morally transformed. A saw-mill, the gift of a generous Eastern layman, has been a most practical means of evangelising, not only furnishing lumber for houses, but healthful occupations for the men. This transformation has been wrought, not by legislation or civilization as such, but by the consistent teaching and example of a devoted Christian man and his splendid helpers. ”

“ All honor to the men and women of character and ability who, as Home Missionaries, are devoting their lives to such fields—the most difficult in the world—where no picturesqueness of scenes or people relieves the strain—where sordid sin, monotony, crudity, and newness prevail, but where the returns in character-building contribute to the life of a nation whose mission is the world. ”

“ A bare message unrelated to life is like seed scattered on the road or on a rock. After sowing one must harrow and cultivate and fight insect pests all the season to get a crop. So a constant process of education, moral, industrial, hygienic, must go on, or there will be no regenerated, fruitful characters.
"The old Indian linked his hunting and corn planting and simple arts to religion. He lived by the help of his gods. We are trying not to destroy this faith, but to transfer it to the living God, and to make it 'work by love,' instead of by selfishness. ”

“ It is axiomatic that if children are to be spared by law the strain of enforced labor upon immature bodies and minds, and to be properly conserved because they are the most precious of the nation's resources, they must be prepared by suitable training for the life work that lies ahead—"making a living being an indispensable foundation for making a life."
Through special circumstances certain parts of our country have been slow in developing the free school so as to make possible even a most elementary education for their children. ”

“ No diagnosing of the immigrant city problem or understanding of the task of securing civic righteousness can be obtained by Home Mission women without realizing the place and influence of amusements upon the lives of the young people of our land.
A noted English playwright stated that "the theatre is literally making the minds of our urban population to-day. It is a huge factory of sentiment, of character, of points of honor, of conception, of conduct, of everything that finally determines the destiny of a nation." ”

“ To the mines and the lumber camps, to the ancient Spanish folk of our continent, to those deluded by the false Prophet—to all of these Home Missions has carried its threefold ministry of saving, teaching and training.
Home Missions counts its lives laid down for the Christ on a hundred fields. No pen can tell of the magnitude of its influence on our national life. Its little enterprises are now the great, strong city churches of Nebraska, Kansas, California, Oregon, in fact of all the States. ”

“ Indeed, the most marked characteristics of our national life until recent years have been those born of contact with frontier conditions—courage, discipline, an austere sense of duty, a passion for work, marvelous practicality joined to a fundamental idealism and love of sentiment, an unconquerable hopefulness and an innate kindness and personal helpfulness. ”

“ While shaping and moulding the thought and life of the people, it has itself developed a content and vision infinitely greater, more inclusive, more of the spirit of the Christ's "I am come that ye might have life and have it more abundantly," than was dreamed of in the days of its beginning. ”

“ Education is one of the expressions of the passionate desire and purpose for betterment of those who gave their impress to our national life. Hamilton Mabie says: "Among Americans education is not only a discipline, a training; it is also a symbol. It means living an ampler life in a larger world."
The church-Home Missions—from the beginning has been the largest factor in the spread of schools and colleges—the greatest single educative force of this country. ”