A girl’s hair receives special attention among the Persian Mohammedans, and must be banged when she is taken to the public bath on the day preceding her marriage. In one of the islands of the New Hebrides the struggling girl is held down by several old women while her two upper front teeth are knocked out as a necessary preparation for marriage.

Among the Lao, where marriage is much more honored and considered more sacred than in many other countries, the boys are freer to do their courting in person, and both boys and girls have far more voice in the selection of a life partner than in countries where women live in seclusion and where polygamy abounds.

Through long years there has run in my ears the brief story of a Christian servant in one of the missionary homes in Persia. “I was married at twelve years and had a baby when I was thirteen, and, oh! how glad I was when it died!” Glad? Of course she was glad. What child of thirteen would want the burden of motherhood?

Who of us who has witnessed the agonies of the little dying child-mother can ever for a moment think with carelessness or indifference of the awful custom of child marriage?

“A girl of fifteen was dying,” writes a friend from India. “Her husband, a man of fifty or more, is a man of good position and considerable means. The girl lay in a bare room with nothing but an unbaked earthenware vessel near her. Her second baby had been born a few days or weeks before and something was wrong.... But she was a purdah woman and could not see the doctor. He had asked a few questions from outside and had diagnosed the illness as tuberculosis, was treating it as such,—and had given it as his opinion that she would die. Our pastor’s wife, dear Mrs. Roy, had somehow gone to see her. Even her non-professional eye saw that a mistake had been made, and she tried to persuade the mother to send for a woman doctor. ‘What was the use? She was doing to die.’

“Mrs. Roy expostulated indignantly with the mother for having married this child of twelve to a grown-up man, just for money. The poor child seemed so sad. Mrs. Roy told her of the Christian’s hope and a Saviour’s love. The child listened with the tears running down her face. Then she asked, ‘May I touch you?’ (Being a mother of a few days she was still unclean and no one would touch her). So Mrs. Roy went to her and held her hands and stroked her face and hair and tried to give her comfort for the journey for which she was so little prepared. Thus is the ‘hope of India’ MURDERED by custom and carelessness and greed. Oh, India is horrible!”

From the Missionary Review of the World (August, 1911) we quote the following statistics, each word and figure of which cries out to us Christian women, “How long, oh, how long, shall these things be?”

The figures are appalling in respect of child-marriages. The census of 1901 showed 121,500 married boys and 243,500 married girls, whose age was under five: 760,000 boys and 2,030,000 girls between the ages of five and ten; 2,540,000 and 6,586,000 between ten and fifteen. Of these, all except a certain number of girls under the last class were married before they were able to realize what marriage is. The most deplorable result of such marriages is seen in the number of widowed children; 6,000 widowers and 96,000 widows were between five and ten; 113,000 widowers and 276,000 widows between ten and fifteen.

The homes of the world need nothing so much as the presence and blessing of the Christ who brought cheer to the home in Cana, comfort to the widow’s home at Nain, resurrection and life to the home at Bethany, vision to the home in Emmaus. How are we to help to make it possible that fathers, mothers, and children in homes where He is not known should hear Him as He stands at the door and knocks, and shall open to Him that He may sup with them and they with Him? Three methods of bringing Christ to needy homes. There are at least three practical methods by which Christian women may help to bring about this result.

First: Through Christian schools which take children and youth in their impressionable years and train them to be the Christian fathers and mothers of the future. We have briefly alluded to this method and shall speak of it more at length in a later chapter.

Second: In Zenana work and other forms of visiting in the homes, in crowded cities, and isolated villages, taking to each individual home the story of the Christ who gathered the little ones in His arms, and the practical, homely lessons of efforts that Christian civilization is making in behalf of home life.

Third: Through the great object lesson, the missionary home.

Never again let it be asked in church or missionary society of a young woman starting for the foreign field, “Are you going out as a missionary, or only as a missionary’s wife?” At a conference for outgoing missionaries, a beautiful, talented college graduate, leader in many activities and full of capacity and consecration, said to a returned missionary,—“I am to be married, and have listened and listened at this conference to know what particular work is waiting for me, but there has been nothing for me as yet.” When it was pointed out to her that by means of her paramount duties and obligations as wife and mother in a missionary home she would have an opportunity of living the missionary message such as few of her fellow missionaries might have, her beautiful face lighted up with a look that illumined it. The making of a missionary home was a vocation indeed to call forth all the highest powers of her consecrated womanhood.

Mr. E. A. Lawrence has stated so clearly the possibilities and opportunities of the missionary home that he is worth quoting at length.

There is an element of missionary life which is seldom presented, yet most important. It is the mission home.... It underlies the whole of the work, and discloses the ideal of Protestant missions more clearly than any other point....

The first thing the Protestant missionary does among the heathen is to establish a home. He approaches them not as a priest, not simply as a man, but as the head of a family, presenting Christianity quite as much in its social as in its individual characteristics. This Christian home is to be the transforming centre of a new community. Into the midst of pagan masses, where society is coagulated rather than organized, where homes are degraded by parental tyranny, marital multiplicity, and female bondage, he brings the leaven of a redeemed family, which is to be the nucleus of a redeemed society.... It is on this mission home that everything else is founded—the school, the college, the kingdom itself....

When they are at their homes, this new institution, with its monogamy, its equality of man and woman, its sympathy between child and parent, its co-operative spirit of industry, its intelligence, its recreation, its worship, is at once a new revelation and a striking object-lesson of the meaning and possibility of family life. Whether they come to his church and school or not, the natives seem always ready to visit the missionary’s home, and to remain there so long, and to conduct themselves so familiarly, that it sometimes becomes necessary to teach them by object-lesson another feature of the Christian home—its privacy....

If the family in its very existence is an important missionary agent, having a distinct work to do, not only for its own members, but for the natives, ... then there must be a distinct acceptance of this office by its members, and it must play its part in the outreaching work of the missionary. The natives must be brought in contact with this domestic sphere. The walls of the home should be at least translucent, that its light may continually shine through to them; its doors should be often open, its table often spread for them; a distinct social as well as Christian fellowship should be cultivated.[26]

“Given to Hospitality” might be the true epitaph on the headstone of most missionary wives, and untold lessons in love and deference between husband and wife, obedience of children, interesting and profitable table conversation, self-control, and courtesy, are taught in the missionary dining room as they could never be taught in church or school room.

“Won’t you write an article on the orderly management of a home for the paper published by the mission?” begged a young Christian teacher who was spending her vacation week as a guest in the missionary home. “The work of each servant and person in this house is arranged for every day, and everything goes on quietly and regularly. Our women have no plan for their day’s work, and I wish they might know how you do it.”

“I was taking dinner at the home of Mr. C.,” said a native pastor, “and his little boy cried for some more of the food he liked. Instead of giving it to him, his mother actually sent him away from the table to stay until he could be pleasant! I never heard of such a thing, but I went home and told my family about it.”

Mrs. J. C. Worley of Matsuyama, Japan, writes: “One woman whom Mr. Worley baptized a year ago walked thirty-five miles over the mountains and carried a baby on her back to get to us so she could learn foreign cooking in a week. I could not do too much after she had made such an effort. She came over every morning into our kitchen, and we proceeded to cook; she with paper and pencil in hand and watching with both eyes. I am wondering what I shall be expected to eat next time we go there. I taught her some new songs for the Sunday School she and her husband hold in their little mountain village. I just wanted to fill her up with good thoughts and helps to take home, as she had made such an effort to get here.”[27]

Even the little missionary children may have their unconscious share in kindling a new light that shall shine in palace and hovel, and be reflected in the faces of parents and children who have long since lost the radiant look they were meant to wear. A woman of high position was making a very formal call in the missionary home, accompanied by many retainers. Every effort was made by the ladies of the station to entertain her fittingly and to bring some gleam of interest to the weary, hopeless face. The piano, beautiful pictures, the wonderful writing machine (typewriter), dainty refreshments,—all were acknowledged courteously, but, neither interest nor heart was touched. At last in desperation the tiny baby in her dainty, long dress was brought out from the bedroom, and, as the visitor’s arms were stretched out eagerly for the cunning form, so different from any baby she had ever seen, the little face looked up into the sad, wondering eyes, and a beautiful smile crept into the baby eyes and hovered about the rosebud mouth. “Oh, see,” whispered the servants in eager watchfulness, “our lady is smiling,—smiling for the first time since her brother died. God bless the little baby who made her smile!”

Ah yes! God bless the missionary babies, and the missionary fathers and mothers, and every one of the men and women whose hearts glow with the love of the great Father whose supreme will it is that “not one of these little ones should perish!”