Missionary Sacrifice and Child Widows in Bengal

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Oct 9, 1913

Missionary Sacrifice and Child Widows in Bengal

SOMETIMES people get an impression that missionaries have an easy time, are paid liberal salaries, and so are not sacrificing very much after all. We do not know what some missionaries may get, but we can assure our friends that no large salaries are paid missionaries who receive funds raised by the circulation of this paper. When we state that the average salary paid them is considerably less than the average wage of a common laboring man at his trade in this country, and this, too, where more must be paid for food and clothes, some estimate may be formed as to whether or not they are influenced very much by the money they receive when volunteering to go into unhealthful climes for the gospel's sake. In this service they can say with the great apostle of the early Christian church, “The love of Christ constraineth me.” Their work is truly a service of love.

The following table showing the number of widows in Bengal from one year old and upward, was recently published in the Prabsi of Allahabad:—

AGE	NO. OF WIDOWS
0–1	433
1–2	576
2–3	651
3–4	1,756
4–5	3,681
5–10	34,705
10–15	75,900
15–20	142,871

The fact that babies in their first year are already widows implies that a far larger number of marriages at that age have taken place, and it might be possible to estimate the number of wives under one, two, three, four years, and upward by multiplying the number of widows by thirty or forty. This applies only to Bengal, and would need to be further multiplied, according to local conditions, to find the total, for all India, of child-widows, and of child-wives, any of whom may become lifelong widows before they know what marriage means.