Common school work in old Stamboul

They organize and superintend and teach common schools and kindergartens. Whether in this common school work in old Stamboul, or in the College for Girls at Scutari the missionary women strongly draw their scholars to admire and to seek likeness to the great model and ideal of Christian character. A girl once taught in one of these schools is always the devoted friend of her teachers, and this fact, alone, ensures to her something at least of steady growth; for she will be borne in mind and will receive kindly words and helpful suggestion, by letter if she has removed to a distant place, up to the very end of her life.

Methods devised by the missionary women attract in the Sunday school. They inspire the native men and women who help as teachers so that none shall go away from the Bible lesson without some new seed-thought fixed in their minds to grow and bear fruit in other scenes. One illustration of the pervading quality of their influence was furnished by their work at Constantinople after the massacre of 1S96. Two thousand families were found to be destitute, having been bereaved, and also stripped of their household goods. Money to keep alive these sufferers quickly came from England and America private ephesus tours, and the missionary ladies were at once in the midst of them. They sought out the needy; they investigated and reported upon their real wants; and they did hard work in distributing clothing, food, and especially materials for work whereby broken families might support themselves.

The attempt to encourage a despairing people

The attempt to encourage a despairing people to believe it worth while again to work for a living, to inspire them with energy to persist in the face of cold, dogged hostility that thought to thwart their efforts to find work, and finally to send to the ends of the earth in order to find market for the wares which the discouraged people began to produce, formed a steady drain upon the sympathy and patience and ingenuity of all who engaged in the work. But through these and similar efforts a great deliverance from de-moralization and even death was made effective to a bewildered and ruined people.

In this summary of general missionary effort at Constantinople we may see how varied in form and how beneficent and persuasive in effect it may be if it is impelled, not by sectarian narrowness, but by the broad purpose of seeking to let the people see the loveliness of Jesus Christ and their own need of Him. It needs no seer’s vision to discover that work like this, supported by that of an uncontroversial but thoroughly Christian press, has quite as much of influence on the life of the masses as the Christian College. It may give direction to the thoughts and tastes and aims of individuals through the whole immense region which looks to Constantinople for guidance in questions of thought and of taste. Shape the thoughts and the aims of individuals and you have done much to fix the destiny of the masses of which they are a part.