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Help for the Unemployed and the Homeless
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temptations. Often indiscriminately classed with the vicious and
degraded, it is only by a superhuman struggle, a more-than-finite
power, that they can be prevented from sinking to the same depths.
Many hold fast their integrity, choosing to suffer rather than to sin.
This class especially demands help, sympathy, and encouragement.
If the poor now crowded into the cities could find homes on
open land, they might not only earn a livelihood but find health and
happiness now unknown to them. Hard work, simple fare, close
economy, often hardship and privation might be their lot, but what
a blessing would be theirs in leaving the city, with its enticements
to evil, its turmoil and crime, misery and foulness, for the country’s
quiet and peace and purity.
Many of those living in the cities have not a square foot of green
grass to put their feet on. Year after year they have looked out upon
filthy courts and narrow alleys, brick walls and pavements, and
skies clouded with dust and smoke. If these could be taken to some
farming district, with green fields, woods, hills, brooks, clear skies,
and fresh, pure air, it would seem almost like heaven.
Cut off to a great degree from contact with and dependence upon
other people, and separated from the world’s corrupting maxims,
customs, and excitements, they would come nearer to the heart of
nature. God’s presence would be more real to them. Many would
learn the lesson of dependence upon Him. Through nature they
would hear His voice speaking to their hearts of His peace and love,
and mind and soul and body would respond to the healing, life-giving
power.
If they ever are to become industrious and self-supporting, very
many must have assistance, encouragement, and instruction. There
are multitudes of poor families for whom no better missionary work
could be done than to assist them in settling on the land and in
learning how to make it yield them a livelihood.
The need for such help and instruction is not confined to the
cities. Even in the country, with all its possibilities for a better
life, multitudes of the poor are in great need. Whole communities
are without education in industrial and sanitary lines. Families live
in shacks, with little furniture and clothing, without tools, without
books, destitute both of comforts and conveniences and of means
of culture. Brutelike souls, bodies weak and ill-formed, reveal the