CHILDREN’S PAGE.
Reading edition
CHILDREN’S INFLUENCE.
MISS MARY BAILEY, VERMONT.
Children’s influence is too much overlooked in the Mission work. Parents, Sabbath-school teachers, and missionary agents do not take the pains they might to create in them a missionary spirit.
As soon as they “can speak and go alone” they should be “bent” into missionary workers. They can be taught to take as much interest in the condition of the Freedmen, Chinese and Indians, as in “Mother Hubbard,” “Jack and the Bean Stalk,” etc. Especially when they are called upon to give their pennies should it be explained to them for what purposes their moneys are solicited.
A little mite of a girl came to me and asked for a penny. “What would you do with a penny?” said I. “Carry it to Sunday-school.” “What do you carry it to Sunday-school for?” “To put it into the conniption box.” “What do you put it into the ‘conniption box’ for?” “For the man.” “What does the man do with it?” “He put it into his pocket!”
After that, when missionary papers came, I read them through to her. By glancing ahead I saw what the facts were, then I would read them in words she could understand. She was so charmed with that kind of reading she would take a toy book out of my hand and hunt up a missionary paper to be read to her instead.
When she saw me glancing along she would exclaim, “Don’t let your eyes zig-zag over the page; read every word!”
The Freedmen interested her very much. She said one morning, “I prayed for the colored people last night; I told Jesus they suffered.” At another time I read about a colored student who was anxious to become a minister, and she “told the Lord that he wanted to be a minister.”
Last Sabbath a missionary preached a very interesting sermon at our church, in the interests of the Freedmen. I hoped he would speak a few words to the children, but he did not.
I asked a little girl of nine years, who thinks she would like to be a missionary, how she liked the sermon? She replied that she could not understand it. I told her that he said the Catholics were sending more teachers among the colored people than we were, and they were fast becoming their converts.
She quickly replied, “Then we shall be slaves; we had better look out!”
If all children under religious instruction were engaged to do all they could in the cause of Missions, what an additional power would their praying and gleanings be against the enemies of Christian liberty.