p. 21 | Spirit of Service Increasing by J. E. FROOM

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jun 21, 1906

Spirit of Service Increasing

By J. E. FROOM

Our colleges are not filled with students that are lured there by mercenary ambition. On every hand commercial schools are vaunting what they can do to help our youth to become “money-makers.” Our schools proclaim their purpose to fit the youth for missionary service. Our schools are, as a rule, enjoying a most cheering attendance, both as to number and character of students. These youth do not refuse to attend our schools unless they are provided with all the facilities of commercial schools.

While visiting one of our southern training-schools recently, I found over thirty bright and capable white students earning their way in a self-supporting industrial school with less facilities than we have provided for the Huntsville Industrial School for colored students, yet they were intelligently happy in their rigorous experience which is to fit them for self-supporting work in difficult fields.

Another most cheering index to the spirit of our schools was impressed upon me recently when at the Walla Walla College. A short course of instruction by a canvassing agent had enlisted so many of the students in that work, and they were so happy and successful in it, that the business manager of the school told me that the students were so eager to put in all their spare time in visiting the homes of the people with our literature that it was difficult to get enough help to continue the industrial departments of the farm and school. That this interest resulted from a love of missionary activity and not from a dislike for farm work was very evident, for while I was there the students’ annual picnic was celebrated by the faculty and students, and the young men who had been out canvassing seriously proposed to devote the forenoon of the picnic day to missionary work and only the afternoon to the holiday. Such sentiments prevailing among our youth will cause salvation to go forth as a lamp that burneth, and “the gentiles shall see thy righteousness. . . . Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken. . . . For as a young man marrieth a virgin, so shall thy sons marry thee.” Isaiah 62.

J. E. FROOM, M. D.