God's Answers A Record of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada

Excerpt

From East London to West Canada is a change pleasing to imagine. From dusky lane and fetid alley to open, bright Canadian fields is, in the very thought, refreshing. A child is snatched from pinching hunger, fluttering rags, and all the squalor of gutter life; from a creeping existence in the noisome pool of slum society is lifted up into some taste for decency and cleanliness; from being trained in the school whose first and last lesson is to fear neither God nor man, is taught the beginnings of Christian faith and duty, and by a strong effort of love and patience is borne away to the free, spacious regions of the western hemisphere, of which it may be said, as of the King's feast, "yet there is room," and where even a hapless waif may get a chance and a choice both for this world and the world that is to come. This is a picture on which a kind heart loves to rest. But who shall make the picture real?

Go and first catch your little Arab, if you can. I say, if you can; for he is too old to be caught by chaff, and you shall need as much guile as any fowler ever did. Then with patient hands bestow on his body its first baptism of clean water, a task often unspeakably shocking; reduce to fit size and shape a cast-off suit humbly begged for the occasion, and give him his first experience of decent clothing. Thereafter, proceed to the work, sometimes the most trying ever undertaken, of taming this singularly acute, desperately sly, and often ferociously savage little Englishman, training him to be what he is not, or harder task still, to be not what he is. Having, by dint of much pains and many prayers, obtained, as you hope, some beginnings of victory over the most wayward of wills, and the most unaccountably strange of mixed natures, with its intellectual sharpness and moral bluntness, its precocious knowingness and stereotyped childishness, its quickness to learn and slowness to unlearn, prepare for the next stage of your enterprise. Lay out your scheme of emigration, get the money where you can, that is to say, call it flown from heaven and wile it out of earthly pockets, anticipate all possible emergencies and wants by land and sea, finish for the time the much epistolary correspondence to which this same fragment of humanity has given rise, tempt the deep with your restless charge, bear the discomforts of the stormiest of seas, and inwardly groan at the signs of other and worse tempests ready ever to burst forth in the Atlantic of that young sinner's future course; and when after many weeks of anxious thought, fatiguing travel, and laborious inquiry you find a home for the child, fold your hands, give thanks and say, "What an adventure! What a toil! But now at length it is finished!" And yet perhaps it is not half finished.

Multiply all this thought and feeling, all this labour and prayer a thousandfold; and imagine the work of a woman as tenderly attached to home and its peaceful ways as any one of her sisters in the three kingdoms, who has made some twenty-eight voyages across the Atlantic "all for love and nothing for reward;" has, by miracles of prayerful toil and self-denying kindness, rescued from a worse than Egyptian bondage over three thousand waifs and strays, borne them in her strong arms to the other side of the world, and planted them in a good land; meanwhile, in the intervals of travel, facing the perils and storms of the troubled sea of East London society at its very worst, and from a myriad wrecks of manhood and womanhood, snatching the stragglers not yet past all hope, and, in a holy enthusiasm of love, parting with not a little of her own life in order that those dead might live.

The outer part of the story alone can be told: the inner part only God and the patient toiler on this field can know. Yet the inner work is by far the greater. The thought, the cares, the fears, the prayers, the tears, the anguish, the heart-breaking disappointments, and the fiery ordeals of spirit by which alone the motive is kept pure and the flame of a true zeal is fed,—in short, all the lavish expenditure of soul that cannot be spoken, or written, or known, until the Omniscient Recorder, who forgets nothing and repays even the good purpose of the heart, will reveal it at the final award, is by far the most important service as it is ever the most toilsome and painful....