And a day is coming when Protestant
women will be _trained_ for this their highest ministry and profession
as they never yet have been.
XXXVII.
THE CHRISTIAN NEIGHBORHOOD.
The spirit of Christian missions to heathen lands and the organizations
to carry them forward commenced, in most Protestant lands, within the
last century. The writer can remember the time when an annual collection
for domestic missions was all the call for such benefactions in a
wealthy New-England parish; while such small pittances were customary
that the sight of a dollar-bill in the collection, even from the richest
men of the church-members, produced a sensation.
In the intervening period since that time, the usual mode of extending
the Gospel among the heathen has been for a few of the most
self-sacrificing men and women to give up country and home and all the
comforts and benefits of a Christian community, and then commence the
family state amid such vice and debasement that it was ruinous to
children to be trained in its midst. And so the result has been, in
multitudes of cases, that children were born only to be sent from
parents to be trained by strangers, and the true "Christian family"
could not be exhibited in heathen lands.
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