THEIR GREATEST NEED

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · May 11, 1904

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 30, No. 19.

THEIR GREATEST NEED.

THE condition of the girls in central Africa is touchingly described by Gertrude Ward, a missionary of the Universities’ Mission, as follows: “Shall we teach them reading?—They have not literature or books of any kind. Writing?—They have no occasion to use it. Arithmetic?—They have no accounts to keep, and are not as a rule required to

count higher than twenty. Sewing?—Their clothes are the loose draperies thrown gracefully around them, and they do not require a single stitch. Laundry work is unknown and unneeded, each person washing her own draperies in the river, and drying them in the sun; housework scarcely exists, the people’s houses being little mud huts to shelter them from wild beasts; they contain no furniture, and few utensils, and the people live almost entirely in the open air.”—Pentecost Herald.

Here is a condition of simplicity itself. No need of anything but the simple Gospel of salvation. Why spend time and means opening up before the heathen a long list of temporal wants that do not minister to actual needs? There is the one thing that all classes of human beings need, and that is salvation. They do not need to be taught to aspire after all the requirements of so-called civilization, much of which is a hindrance to the Christian life. Often the least they know of this world’s accomplishments and embellishments and “wisdom,” the more susceptible they are to a simple knowledge and practise of the truth. Life in the “open air,” with food and covering, is the ideal life, if there be with it the knowledge of Christ. “Having food and raiment [let them] be therewith content.” The simpler, the better, if the food be nourishing, and the raiment comfortable.