An Incident

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D.C. · Feb 11, 1904

LAST winter in the city of New York, several intelligent and devotedly religious ladies resolved to gather together the poor, neglected mothers in a certain wretched quarter, and teach them how to fulfil their duties to their children.

A hall was hired, and the ladies went in turn on three afternoons of each week to lecture to their protégées.

During the first month they all pursued the same course. They came attired in handsome street costumes, greeted the women kindly, and then read a written lecture, in which the shortcomings of mothers were set forth, and the peril of neglect to their children was urged with earnestness, and sometimes with sternness.

The lectures seemed to produce little effect. The women resented the patronage and the advice, and only came again lured by the tea and cake which followed the lecture.

At last it was the turn of a bright and sensible young mother, who had a child a year old.

She entered the hall very simply dressed, carrying the boy in her arms, nodding and smiling to the women who crowded around her, as to friends.

“I thought you would like to see my baby,” she said. After the child had been petted and admired, she added, “It is healthy, as you see. I have had the advice of a good doctor, who has told me how to dress, and bathe, and feed it. I am going to give this advice to you. It is very simple.”

She showed them how to wash and care for a child, even to the sterilizing of the milk given it; and when she had finished, looking up at the eager faces, with tears in her own eyes, she said: “Now let us ask Jesus, who loved his mother, to help us care for our babies.”

A woman said afterward, “I never shall forget what she taught us, because she was just a woman and a mother like me.”

Jesus, when he would heal the sick, laid his hands upon them before he blessed them.—The Youth’s Companion.