Firstly, we dare not withhold the Gospel from the very worst of people.
As Christ came to call not the saints but sinners to
repentance, so the New Message of Temporal Salvation, of salvation
from pinching poverty, from rags and misery, must be offered to all.
They
may reject it, of course. But we who call ourselves by the name of
Christ are not worthy to profess to be His disciples until we have
set an open door before the least and worst of these who are now
apparently imprisoned for life in a horrible dungeon of misery and
despair. The responsibility for its rejection must be theirs, not
ours. We all know the prayer, "Give me neither poverty nor
riches, feed me with food convenient for me"--and for every
child of man on this planet, thank God the prayer of Agur, the son of
Jakeh, may be fulfilled.
This sad passage explains how respectable girls can become more entrapped than streetwise ones. The story continues today, via the evils of sex-trafficking.
A
girl was some time ago discharged from a city hospital after an
illness. She was homeless and friendless, an orphan, and obliged to
work for her living. Walking down the street and wondering what she
should do next, she met a girl, who came up to her in a most friendly
fashion and speedily won her confidence. "Discharged
ill, and nowhere to go, are you?" said her new friend. "Well,
come home to my mother's; she will lodge you, and we'll go to work
together, when you are quite strong." The
girl consented gladly, but found herself conducted to the very lowest
part of Woolwich and ushered into a brothel; there was no mother in
the case. She was hoaxed, and powerless to resist. Her protestations
were too late to save her, and having had her character forced from
her she became hopeless, and stayed on to live the life of her false
friend.
There
is no need for me to go into the details of the way in which men and
women, whose whole livelihood depends upon their success in disarming
the suspicions of their victims and luring them to their doom,
contrive to overcome the reluctance of the young girl without
parents, friends, or helpers to enter their toils. What fraud fails
to accomplish, a little force succeeds in effecting; and a girl who
has been guilty of nothing but imprudence finds herself an outcast
for life. The very innocence of a girl tells against her. A woman of
the world, once entrapped, would have all her wits about her to
extricate herself from the position in which she found herself. A
perfectly virtuous girl is often so overcome with shame and horror
that there seems nothing in life worth struggling for. She accepts
her doom without further struggle, and treads the long and torturing
path-way of "the streets" to the grave.
How poor people almost invariably become far more effective givers and 'fighters' than the rich.
How
hardly shall they that have riches enter into the Kingdom of Heaven!
It is easier to make a hundred poor men sacrifice their lives than it
is to induce one rich man to sacrifice his fortune, or even a portion
of it, to a cause in which, in his half-hearted fashion, he seems to
believe. When I look over the roll of men and women who have given up
friends, parents, home prospects, and everything they possess in
order to walk bare-footed beneath a burning sun in distant India, to
live on a handful of rice, and die in the midst of the dark heathen
for God and the Salvation Army, I sometimes marvel how it is that
they should be so eager to give up all, even life itself, in a cause
which has not power enough in it to induce any reasonable number of
wealthy men to give to it the mere superfluities and luxuries of
their existence. From those to whom much is given much is expected;
but, alas, alas, how little is realised! It is still the widow who
casts her all into the Lord's treasury--the wealthy deem it a
preposterous suggestion when we allude to the Lord's tithe, and count
it boredom when we ask only for the crumbs that fall from their
tables.
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