DOING HER WORK | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jan 28, 1897

DOING HER WORK.

ABOUT thirty years ago a young girl in a western city was given charge of a Sunday-school class of rough boys, usually known as “river rats,” who had never been in any school before. When she entered the room, she found them lounging on the desks and benches, wearing their hats, and puffing vile cigars, a defiant leer on every face. They greeted her with a loud laugh, and one of them exclaimed: “Well, sis, you going to teach us?”

She stood silent until the laugh was over, and then said quietly, “Do I look like a lady?”

An astonished stare was the only reply which they gave.

“Because,” she continued gently, “gentlemen, when a lady enters the room, take off their hats and throw away their cigars.”

The lowest American secretly believes himself to be a gentleman, and in a moment every hat was off, and the lads were ranged in orderly attention.

So remarkable was the success of this girl in managing and influencing men of the roughest sort, that she made it the work of her life. She established clean and respectable boarding houses for sailors and boatmen, and reading and coffee rooms for laborers, and founded an Order of Honor, the members of which strove to live sober, Christian lives themselves, and to help their fellows to do the same.

Some of the members of her first class were efficient helpers for twenty years in all her work. It was a favorite saying with them, “Once let Miss — get her hold upon a man, and she never lets him go.”

She never did let go, but followed him to sea, to the most distant parts of the world, or even to prison, with letters and little gifts. With all the tender pity of a mother, she strove, as many a mother does not strive, to bring the wanderer back to the faith and innocence of his childhood.

Thousands of men passed under this single woman’s influence, and learned something of her Master through her wonderful purity and strong faith in him.

Such instances of helpfulness are not rare in this country. With every year the zeal of educated Christian men and women finds new and practical methods of teaching and elevating the more ignorant people.

Singularly, these efforts are more common in cities than in the smaller towns and villages, where everybody knows everybody, and where the gradations of caste are, perhaps, fixed by strong prejudices.

Many a young lad or girl who reads these lines leads an idle life in such a village, indulging, it may be, in occasional vague visions of going to foreign fields to teach the heathen how to be Christians, while the wharves or taverns of their own native villages are filled with heathen for whose souls no man has ever cared.

Let every Christian ask himself as the day closes: “Have I stood idle in the market place? Has not my Master hired me with a great price to do his work?” —Selected.