p. 357 | Rescue the Children by Cannon Farrar

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Aug 10, 1882

Rescue the Children.

By Cannon Farrar

THE late Cardinal Wiseman said, "Give me the children of England, and in twenty years England shall be Catholic." I say, "Give us the children of England, and in twenty years England shall not only be temperate, but"—and the words seem to open a vista of progress and prosperity such as we can hardly conceive—"England shall not only be temperate, but shall be a nation of total abstainers." Well, now, I ask you, is it really an injury to induce children to take the pledge, or is it an injury, with heartless prejudice and callous obstinacy, to leave them exposed without defense to all the terrible temptations and enormous evils of drink? It seems to me that if we can succeed in saving them from that, we may laugh to scorn the ridiculous notion that we do them any harm by inducing them to give up that which they do not need, which they naturally do not like, and which can be nothing to them but a source of peril and of ruin.

Almost every book one takes up contains some damning evidence as the awful consequences of drink, and only yesterday I was reading a book by the author of "John Halifax, Gentleman," in which she describes her visit to the East London Hospital for Children, and she tells how the nurse said that numbers of children from the district, full of drink and ignorance, are brought there with cancer, hip disease, and disease of the bones, with rickets and all kinds of constitutional corruption, so weakly from the constitution which they have inherited from vicious parents, that, although they could only be saved by surgery, they are too weak to undergo an operation, and her remark upon it is this: "For such children and in such places, death itself seems to be a better thing than life." Even more than that, we find poor little hapless children, whom God made to live and to be happy, dying in this Christian England, in this very year, by something which bears a sort of grotesque and horrible resemblance to unconscious suicide. At the very beginning of this year, amidst the very sound of the blessed Christmas bells, amidst the rejoicings with which the new year was introduced by Christian people, one little child of three, in Glasgow, gets up in the night, takes the whisky which its mother has been drinking, drinks, and is found lying dead in its bed in the morning; and that England may not be behind Scotland, another little child of four, at Huddersfield, sees that its mother has bought some spirits to welcome friends, gets up in the same way, drinks the spirits, and is found dead in the morning. Now, let us ask whether there can be anything worse than all this neglect and accident and cruelty and disease and death? Yes; there is something worse than all this—there is sin. Disease and accident and cruelty and death may maim and torture the body, murder and suicide may end the life, but sin blasts and corrupts the soul, and many and many a drunkard's child in England is being trained up deliberately in the habits of sin.

I believe that there are people wicked enough and imbecile enough to say that the mention of these very painful facts is what they call "sensationalism." Now, what have I been doing? I have merely been mentioning one or two facts out of hundreds and hundreds of similar facts, not drawn from disputable sources, but simply from the cold, daily, impartial records of justice, and only bearing upon one single fraction of all the terrible evidence which ought to exert all the powers of every Christian man in doing what little he can to resist the tyranny of drink. There are people who talk of "sensationalism" when we speak of facts like these.—Cannon Farrar