p. 9 | Whose Boy?

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Dec 15, 1910

Whose Boy?

SOME years ago the late Horace Mann, the eminent educator, delivered an address at the opening of some reformatory institution for boys, during which he remarked that if only one boy was saved from ruin, it would pay for all the cost and care and labor of establishing such an institution as that. After the exercises Mr. Mann was asked:—

“Did you not color it a little, when you said that all the expense and labor would be repaid if only one boy was saved thereby?”

“Not if it was my boy,” was the solemn and convincing reply.

Ah! there is a wonderful value about “my boy.” Other boys may be rude and rough; other boys may be reckless and wild; other boys may seem to require more pains and labor than they ever will repay; other boys may be left to drift uncared-for to the ruin which is so near at hand; but “my boy”—it were worth the toil of a lifetime and the lavish wealth of a world to save him from temporal and eternal ruin. We would go the world around to save him from peril, and would bless every hand that was stretched out to give him help or welcome. And yet every poor, wandering, outcast, homeless man is one whom some fond mother called “my boy.” Every lost woman, sunken in the depths of sin, was somebody’s daughter in her days of childish innocence. To-day somebody’s son is a hungry outcast, pressed to the very verge of crime and sin. To-day somebody’s daughter is a weary, helpless wanderer, driven in the paths that lead to death. Shall we shrink from labor, shall we hesitate at cost, when the work before us is the salvation of a soul?—Not if it is “my boy;” not if we have the love of Him who gave his life to save the lost.—Common People.