Your Children

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Tacoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Apr 25, 1912

WILL you not read the following paragraph prayerfully? It is drawn from the experience of one of our successful young people's workers. This worker says:—

“I am making a special effort to get in closer touch with the parents this year, because whether the children become Christians or not depends so much upon the parents. The cares of this world keep many of them blind to the need of the children till they go wrong or marry out of the truth, and then they appeal to us to save them. At our last camp-meeting a mother said to me, ‘My boy will be here to-day,’ and I knew that she wanted me to speak to him, as we had been close friends since he was a tiny boy. As I looked at his bloated face, and saw the cigars sticking out of his pockets, I thought how the years since I had seen him had changed the bright-faced, cheery boy, with manly ways and always a helping hand; as I spoke to him of the things so near my heart, he said: ‘It is no use to talk; I know the right way, and would like to walk in it, but it is too hard to give up the things I have learned to love, and the company I keep.’ Tears ran down his face as we talked, and my heart ached for him, for his broken-hearted mother, and for his young wife. Then I remembered that his parents had taken him to the place of entertainment, the local grange, where he had first learned to associate with the outside boys, and had seen them do the things he was now doing. No appeal could break the bands that bound him, and his only sister has married a man who is fast becoming a drunkard.”