Sabbath-School Giving

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jan 17, 1884

Sabbath-School Giving.

GIVING is as clearly a duty as praying; and that Sabbath-school which does not inculcate the duty of giving is unworthy of the name. As to the claim that “all the scholars” in any Sabbath-school “are too poor to give,” there is not enough of truth in it to make it worthy of respect. When you can convince the dramshop keepers, and the tobacco venders, and the candy dealers, and the peanut and pop-corn peddlers, that the “poorer classes” are all too poor to buy anything except the absolute necessaries of life, then it will be time to ask a fair discussion of that point from Sabbath-school workers. But, meantime, it will be found that that excuse is not made by the poor themselves, nor yet by those who are most familiar with the poor, and who have largest sympathy with the poor. It commonly comes from those who are so unused to the blessedness of denying themselves in order to Christian giving, that they do not more than half believe the words of our Lord Jesus, that “it is more blessed to give than to receive.” Those persons who have had widest experience in mission-school work are all agreed that added interest and added profit come to any and every school through encouraging and training its scholars to a part in liberal giving. If, indeed, there be a single scholar, who is a helpless pauper, without the possibility of earning anything, or saving anything, or sparing anything, in proof of his love for his Lord, by all means let that scholar understand that he is exempt from giving; but don’t keep all the rest of the school from a share in the blessedness of giving because of his incompetency. You might as well give up all singing in Sabbath-school, because one of the scholars is deaf and dumb and blind.—S. S. Times.