Give Them Water by Mrs. A. D. Wellman

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Oct 31, 1907

Give Them Water

By Mrs. A. D. Wellman

MRS. A. D. WELLMAN

A NEIGHBOR'S child who often comes to our home, one day got possession of a choice volume, thinking to look at the pictures in it. I told him that I suspected his hands were not perfectly clean, hence he better not handle that book; and I gave him something else to amuse him.

But soon he asked for another book that I had sometimes shown him. Again I expressed fear that his hands were a little soiled; and thereupon, with an appealing pathos in his childish voice, he asked, “Why don’t you give me some water to wash my hands in?”

This trifling incident aroused in my mind a query as to whether we do not sometimes hold unfortunate souls aloof as unclean, practically forbidding them the best of life, when we might instead help them to become fitted therefor.

Santa Cruz, Cal.