Home Missions in Action | Page 7

homes, hunger, sickness, poverty, degradation, all fall heavily upon women and their helpless little ones.
When the guns have ceased their work of death and the ruined land turns to rebuild its broken commerce and industry, it is the children who must grow up under the privations and the stunting burdens of fearful taxation. From the cradle to the grave, they must pay the billions of treasure eaten up by devastating, destroying war.
Let every Home Missionary woman, to whom this land is dear, who cherishes father, husband, son or brother, who clings to loved home and precious children, use all her influence to bring in the day when the Christ standard shall be the standard for all our national and international relations.
O bells, to-day let warfare cease! Christ came to be a Prince of Peace. No longer let the sound of drum Or trumpet, campward calling, come To vex the earth with dread, and make The hearts of wives and mothers ache. Leave battle flags to moths and dust-- Let sword and gun grow red with rust! Earth groaned with carnage--let it cease-- Ring in the thousand years of Peace!
Ring out the littleness of things, Ring in the broader thought that brings Swift end to all ignoble creeds. Ring in an age of noble deeds For all things pure, and high, and good-- The era of true brotherhood. Ring out the lust for gold and gain-- The greed that cripples soul and brain, And open eyes, long blind, to see What grander, better things there be! [Footnote: Eben Rexford.]
Home Missions is one of the greatest contributors to national righteousness. Through it the higher life of the community is developed in the formative period; through it belated peoples receive the spiritual transforming dynamic that makes them reach up to the higher and better in their surroundings and gives them a developing effectiveness and efficiency.
It brings the same force with greater power into the lives of the children, giving them also a training of minds and hands that equips them for an enlarging sphere of usefulness.
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.
To all that is noblest, highest and best in our national life, Home Missions has given in large measure.
Home Missions faces forward, realizing that infinitely greater responsibility and service must now enter into the mission of the church at home, if this country is to remain Christian itself and be a force for Christianity in the world.

II
A RECLAIMING FORCE
"Go ye and teach the next one whom you meet-- Man, woman, child, at home or on the street-- That 'God so loved them' each in thought so sweet He could not have them lost through sin's defeat, But sent you with His message to repeat That pardon through His Son might be complete. So shall our land be saved from sore defeat And gather with the nations at His feet."
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Referring to the incident when the disciples, James and John, confronted by the lame man at the gate Beautiful of the Temple, gave him restored health through the power of the Christ, instead of the alms which he solicited, Dr. John Henry Jowett said: "He, the Master, gave fundamentally to those in need. He did not attend to the symptoms, but cured the disease. He gave capacity for incapacity, ability for inability, life for feebleness. He strengthened the wills of those born impotent and gave them the power of self-control. "As Christ gave fundamentally in His earthly ministry, so He has given since. It is still the greatest mission of the church to reach and restore--to give "capacity."
Christ said, "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you." It can never come in society, it can never prevail in a nation, until it has first come into individual lives and found expression through them.
"All true progress," says the Hon. James Bryce, "has always been from the soul working outward through men's acts, and it is so to-day."
Home Missions has pre-eminently been the agent of the church in this fundamental work of reclamation. Let us go to the laboratory of the Mission fields where we may see Home Missions in action, and witness the Christ power to restore, uplift, transform, to give capacity.
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It was a crisp day in early autumn when the visitor from the