Loyalty to Our Institutions
[
Health, Philanthropic, and Medical Missionary Work, 29-33
(1888).]
The sanitarium at Battle Creek has been built up under a pressure
of difficulties. There have had to be decisive measures taken, contracts
signed by those who were engaged as helpers that they would remain a
certain number of years. This has been a positive necessity. After help
has been secured, and by considerable painstaking efforts these have
become efficient workers, wealthy patients have held out inducements
of better wages to secure them as nurses for their own special benefit,
at their own homes. And these helpers have often left the sanitarium
and gone with them, without taking into consideration the labor that
had been put forth to qualify them as efficient workers. This has not
been the case in merely one or two instances, but in many cases.
Then people have come as patrons from other institutions that are
not conducted on religious principles, and in a most artful manner have
led away the help by promising to give them higher wages. Physicians
have apostatized from the faith and from the institution, and have left
because they could not have their own way in everything. Some have
been discharged, and after obtaining the sympathy of others of the
helpers and patients, have led these away; and after being at great
expense and trying their own ways and methods to the best of their
ability, they have made a failure and closed up, incurring debts that
they could not meet. This has been tried again and again. Justice and
righteousness have had no part in the movements of such. “The way
of the Lord” has not been chosen but their own way. They beguiled the
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unwary and made an easy conquest of those who love change. They
were too much blinded to consider the right and wrong of this course,
and too reckless to care.
Thus it has been necessary in the sanitarium at Battle Creek to
make contracts binding those who connected with it as helpers, so
that after they have been educated and trained as nurses and as bath
hands, they shall not leave because others present inducements to
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