The Prospering Hand of God in Our School Work by W. E. Howell

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Dec 14, 1916

The Prospering Hand of God in Our School Work

By W. E. Howell

LIKE the season of nature in the plant world, the harvest time of our schools is in the autumn. With the hay and corn crops securely stored in barns, and with the gathering of the golden corn and many-hued apples and the juicy vegetables in progress, we reap in joy that fruitage of the summer's sowing which is of infinitely greater value—the harvest home of our boys and girls.

The time was when we had no such citadels of moral refuge during the educational period, as are our schools. Till thirty years after the 1844 movement, the need of such institutions was not recognized, and no schools were built. When present truth entered a new household, the children continued going to the secular schools, as did the writer during the first twelve years of his education, and until seven years after the message reached his heart and his home. We were taunted with our religion, while being taught at school the same things as unbelievers, and left with only such a modicum of Christian instruction as was afforded by the Sabbath school.

Little chance of service was held out to us other than to find a place for ourselves in the workaday world about us. Some went into commercial work, some stayed on the farm, some engaged in teaching the same things they were taught in the day school, and in the same way, as did the writer. Some drifted aimlessly. Enough were attracted into the world and lost to the truth to offset largely the increase of converts to the faith. The denominational leaders were wearing themselves out in their arduous labor, and dropping out of the race, with few recruits to take their places or to fill the new openings in a progressive work.

Then came the message, clear and strong, “Educate, educate, educate our young men and women of promise to go forth as laborers into the harvest field.” In response to this message our first college was established in Battle Creek in 1874. This was followed by our first two academies, at South Lancaster, Mass., and Healdsburg, Cal., in 1882; two more colleges, Union at Lincoln, Neb., and Walla Walla, at Walla Walla, Wash., were opened in 1891 and 1892 respectively; and finally the Washington Missionary College was established in 1904. The school at Healdsburg had already been made a college. Young men and women of maturity were pressed into these schools and sent out as laborers.

Again came the message, equally clear and strong, “The children are being neglected. Establish schools to save and instruct them.” Simultaneously, in the later nineties, local schools and academies began to spring up everywhere, until today we have some fifteen thousand boys and girls from the homes of believers, under daily instruction in Christian schools of these two classes.

More than this, the school began to be recognized as an important factor in pioneer missionary effort, especially in heathen lands. In Africa, in the Far East, in the islands of the sea, this idea has grown until we now number more than ten thousand students receiving instruction and training in Seventh-day Adventist mission schools. At home also, in our own Southland, pioneer schools of this mission type are doing a service of no mean extent and value. There are now some thirty of these, with the Normal and Agricultural Institute at Madison, Tenn., as their training school.

Youngest to join our sisterhood of schools is the new College of Medical Evangelists at Loma Linda, Cal., where one hundred or more of our most capable young men and women are being educated for that branch of our denominational effort which has been called “the right arm of the message.”

Under the blessing of God, therefore, our total educational enrolment of all kinds has reached the gratifying number of about thirty-two thousand. Comparing this result with the time when we had no school at all, and bearing in mind the fact that the last twenty years of our seventy-two years of denominational history have witnessed the addition of at least nine tenths of this grand total, we can echo feelingly and intelligently the sentiment of that first electrical message which flashed from the wires of Morse's triumph, “What hath God wrought!”

If we do our duty in giving these schools the support they need to bring the work up to the highest grade of efficiency,—moral and financial support, especially in the form of student patronage and facilities,—who can say what God will accomplish through them in the few years that yet remain for the finishing of the work? W. E. HOWELL.