p. 5 | Princes Indeed by A. W. SPAULDING

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Aug 11, 1910

Princes Indeed

By A. W. SPAULDING

A. W. SPAULDING

ALONG a muddy road a short time ago, a lady whom I knew overtook me in a carriage and invited me to ride. We fell to talking of the needs of the mountain people. She herself, native-born but highly educated and cultured, has taken a great interest in helping poor mountain girls. She spoke of the results from one of the large schools in Asheville, a school that is widely recognized as an influence in industrial education for the mountaineer. The girls’ part of the school is located in the city, with big buildings and modern conveniences. “But they don’t fit the girls for the life they must lead,” she said. “With electric lights and steam heat, with finely equipped kitchen and a steam laundry, they lead them away from their former life; but when the many go back to the

log cabin, to cook in a stone fireplace, and do the washing at the spring, with an iron kettle for a boiler, they are at a loss to know how to transform the life into anything better. A Swedish man, one of my neighbors, who had taken one of the girls from this school to help in his family, complained to me, ‘I sendt to them for a saarvant, and they sendt me a preencess!’ Though such schools have done some good service, somehow they don’t reach the core of the mountain needs.”

“We must train them,” I suggested, “under the conditions they have to live under.”

“Yes, but how?” she exclaimed. I told her more of our plan of school work,—of the family instead of the institutional life, of the small farm schools established in many places instead of one central institution, of the family and the teacher living in the needy community,—and she highly approved. “If you succeed in doing that,” she said, “you will go a long way toward solving the problem that a hundred years of effort have not yet solved.”

To Seventh-day Adventists, God gives these great opportunities. We not only know that we have the truth which must be given to the world, but we are able to know, if we will study, how to give it. “Yes, but how?” is the question that echoes in the minds and hearts of many of the world’s philanthropists. We are to answer it; not merely as a people, as institutions, but as families and as individuals. This work must be done, not by one or two schools, but by hundreds of consecrated families. The influence of the regular, industrious, frugal, self-sacrificing Christian family will be a greater factor in giving the truth than many sermons. “In the South there is much that could be done by lay members of the church, persons of limited education. . . . Let Sabbath-keeping families move to the South, and live out the truth before those who know it not.”—“Testimonies for the Church,” Vol. VII, page 227. There are in the way difficulties, privations, and obstacles undreamed-of by many; but the love of God in the heart will overcome all these. We can not come as princes; we must come as servants; but to serve as the Master served is to be princes indeed.

Naples, N. C.