A SUGGESTIVE CONTRAST by Editor

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 23, 1901

A SUGGESTIVE CONTRAST

By Editor

New York Tribune

“HAVE mercy upon all Jews, Turks, infidels, and heretics, and take from them all ignorance, hardness of heart, and contempt of thy word.” This is the prayer which will be offered in many a Christian house of worship to-day. What petitions Mohammedans may make in our behalf, or what prayers the children of Israel will offer up for their Gentile neighbors, we are unable to say; but a curious commentary on this Good Friday collect is to be found in two stories, of which most newspapers in this neighborhood made note at the time.

The one is that of a young girl who leaves her family, to earn her own living by “teaching school” in a Connecticut village rejoicing in the Scriptural name of Mount Carmel. She has not been many months in this community when stories to her disadvantage begin to be whispered about, and finally some anonymous scoundrel brings charges before the school committee, accusing her of being an “immoral person, unfit to teach the young.” Vague as to facts, but on investigation bent, two members of the board of visitors—one of them a clergyman—call at the schoolhouse, and for eight long hours, without intermission, subject the poor girl to a trial that reminds one forcibly of the examination of a “suspect” before a French juge d’instruction. For eight long hours these inquisitors question, and cross-question, badger, torment, and frighten an inexperienced girl against whom there is no proof whatever of misbehavior beyond a little youthful imprudence and some not unnatural thoughtlessness. Not content with this, they next proceed to call in the school children, one by one, and interrogate them as to what they know about their teacher’s daily doings. After this humiliating ordeal the poor victim goes home, and the next morning, her mind having given way under the strain, she is found lying unconscious in a snowdrift, all but dead from mental excitement and physical exposure.

The other story is that of a young woman of Jewish parentage who mysteriously disappears from her home in Brooklyn. For a while no trace of her is found anywhere. After a week or so a friend of the family, much upset at finding that the police suspect him of being implicated in her disappearance, attempts suicide, and on his deathbed (as he supposes) confesses to a knowledge of her hiding-place. In the house of a midwife in this city she is found by her distracted parents only a few days after the birth of her child. There is no room here for doubt or uncertainty. No inquisitorial proceeding is necessary to wring a confession of the wretched story from her lips. The one stubborn fact—her maternity—is not to be gainsaid. She has violated all moral and social law. In the eyes of a charitable world she had become an “outcast.” In Mount Carmel she would only inspire loathing.

But how do the parents, whose hearts she has wrung, and whose heads she has bowed, treat this weak and erring child? How, indeed? Is she repudiated and thrown out upon the world to hide her shame as best she may, and, alone and unprotected, to go from bad to worse because no helping hand is held out, no respectable future considered possible for her?—No; O ye Carmelites! She is forgiven; her sin is forgotten; she is welcomed—she and her child—by those whom her transgression dishonored. The parental roof once more shelters her whom you would cast into the snowdrifts of an unfeeling world. She still has a future before her.

The moral courage of that step, in the face of society’s prejudices, reveals a spirit of devotion and sacrifice on the part of those Jewish parents that is sublime.

And yet—and yet—we shall go on, no doubt,

praying, as for many years past, “Have mercy upon all Jews, Turks, infidels, and heretics, and take from them all ignorance, hardness of heart, and contempt of thy word.”