What a Letter Did

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Mar 28, 1907

What a Letter Did

A WOMAN who had known wealth and gentle surroundings suffered reverses and found herself among rough people in the logging districts in the northwest. If poverty had been her only misfortune it would not have been so bad; but with the loss of means and the subsequent privations, had come also a neglect of the moral and spiritual side of life, a decadence of her better self, which made her a person of small account, even among her rough neighbors.

A Christian worker in that region, seeking to obtain good reading-matter for the people in his district, wrote and obtained the names of thirty families in one well-known city church, each family agreeing to send to a designated family in the woods its second-hand reading-matter. This was so different from the usual sending out of barrels of cast-off clothing that some of the donors entered into correspondence with those to whom their periodicals were mailed.

So it came about that a refined woman in the distant city, following her magazines with a letter, was surprised to receive a reply as well written as her own letter had been, and showing evidence of no little culture.

To the woman in the logging-camp the letter of the city woman was a new contact with the life that she had thought forever lost to her, and it quickened her pulse a little to be writing again to a gentlewoman.

The correspondence went on for some time, with profit on both sides. The city friend — for such she had come to be — improved the opportunity to plead with the woman in the woods to turn again to those better things in life which she had so long neglected, and to trust God for help. A penitent but earnest resolution, with a prayer and a promise, found expression in the next letter — a promise that she would make the effort, would try to lift herself to a higher plane.

She did try, and she succeeded. She is honored now for the good work she is doing for her neighbors; and the neighbors have not ceased to marvel at the change. But she herself knows that its beginning was in the Christian love and fellowship that came to her from far away.

“Why must you polish that lens with the palm of your hand?” asked a man in a telescope factory.

“There comes a time in the making of a fine lens,” the workman replied, “when nothing can be substituted for the human touch.”

It is so with our efforts to help men and women to lead a better life. The reading-matter, of itself, might have done good, but how blessed was the letter that brought with it the sense of companionship and sympathy! — Youth’s Companion.