Sight to the Blind

Sight to the Blind, by Lucy
Furman

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Title: Sight to the Blind
Author: Lucy Furman
Release Date: April 11, 2004 [EBook #11998]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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THE BLIND ***

Produced by Al Haines

SIGHT TO THE BLIND
A STORY
BY

LUCY FURMAN

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
IDA TARBELL

1914

TO HARRIET BUTLER

Contents
INTRODUCTION BY IDA M. TARBELL SIGHT TO THE BLIND
AFTERWORD
The illustrations reproduced in the Introduction to this volume have
been selected from those in Miss Furman's "Mothering on Perilous."

Introduction Ida M. Tarbell

Introduction
A more illuminating interpretation of the settlement idea than Miss
Furman's stories "Sight to the Blind" and "Mothering on Perilous" does
not exist. Spreading what one has learned of cheerful, courageous,
lawful living among those that need it has always been recognized as
part of a man's work in the world. It is an obligation which has
generally been discharged with more zeal than humanity. To convert at
the point of a sword is hateful business. To convert by promises of
rewards, present or future, is hardly less hateful. And yet much of the

altruistic work of the world has been done by one or a union of these
methods.
That to which we have converted men has not always been more
satisfactory than our way of going at it. It has often failed to make
radical changes in thought or conduct. Our reliance has been on
doctrines, conventions, the three R's. They are easily sterile--almost
sure to be if the teacher's spirit is one of cock-sure pride in the
superiority of his religion and his cultivation.
The settlement in part at least is the outgrowth of a desire to find a
place in which certain new notions of enlightening men and women
could be freely tested and applied. The heart of the idea lies in its name.
The modern bearers of good tidings instead of handing down principles
and instructions at intervals from pulpit or desk settle among those who
need them. They keep open house the year around for all, and to all
who will, give whatever they have learned of the art of life. They are
neighbors and comrades, learners as well as teachers.
It would be hard to find on the globe a group of people who need more
this sort of democratic hand-to-hand contact than those Miss Furman
describes, or a group with whom it is a greater satisfaction to establish
it. Tucked away on the tops and slopes of the mountains of Eastern
Kentucky and Tennessee are thousands of families, many of them
descendants of the best of English stock. Centuries of direful poverty
combined with almost complete isolation from the life of the world has
not been able to take from them their look of race, or corrupt their
brave, loyal, proud hearts. Encircled as they are by the richest and most
highly cultivated parts of this country, near as they are to us in blood,
we have done less for their enlightenment than for that of the Orient,
vastly less than we do for every new-come immigrant. On the religious
side all that they have had is the occasional itinerant preacher,
thundering at them of the wrath of God; and on the cultural what Aunt
Dalmanutha calls the "pindling" district school. In the teachings of both
is an over-weight of sternness and superstition, little "plain human
kindness," almost nothing that points the way to decent, happy, healthy
living.

The results are both grotesque and pitiful. Is it strange that the feud
should flourish in a land ruled by a "God of wrath?" Is anything but
sickness and death to be expected where both are looked on as
visitations of an angry God?
Among these victims of our neglect and our blundering methods of
teaching the settlement school has gone. It goes to stay. Not three
months, but twelve months its teaching goes on; not one Sabbath in the
month, but three hundred and sixty-five days in the year it preaches.
Literally it is a new world which the settlement opens to the
mountaineers, one ruled by cleanliness, thrift, knowledge and good-will.
The beauty of it is that living day after day under this order they come
to know that its principles are practical truths; that they work out. To be
told that the baby is dying not because the Lord is