No matter where they go, this hymn, and others like it, shall go with them; cleansing and purifying, like a breath of sweet air, all the dreadful remembrances of that foul home from which they were rescued. Think what it were to change the life, temporal and eternal, of _one_ such child! And God be praised, the number of the saved is Legion. How like a dreadful dream to the girl, in a happy home of her own, with her own innocent baby on its father's knee, will be the pit of degradation, where, but for this charity, _she_ might have been lost. She realizes it fully now, when she looks into her little baby's face, and grows chill with fear as she kisses it. And her brother! the hale, sturdy-honest, well-to-do farmer, who comes in of an evening to talk about _his_ farm and _his_ crops, and _his_ barns full of plenty--can that be Johnny? once with the hat guiltless of a brim, the coat with one flap, the trousers with half a leg, and the mouth full of oaths and obscenity! Can that be Johnny, who dodged policemen so adroitly, and was on the high road to the gallows in short jackets? This is not fiction. This is not imagination. The biographies of great men and women will yet adorn your library shelves, whose childhood had such rescuing as this. One gets the heart-ache at every step in New York, if he has eyes or ears for aught save Mammon; and yet how like sun-beams, now and then, across this darkness, comes some noble charity, of whose existence you knew nothing, till some unpretentious sign arrests the eye, in some street never before travelled by you in your daily rounds--some "Asylum," or "Retreat," or "Home," or Hospital, at whose gate Mercy stands with outstretched arms, nor asks the poor unfortunate whom it shelters, its creed or its nationality, but says only--Here is comfort and help.
This much concerning _organized_ Charities. But of the noble women, and men, too, who daily and quietly stretch out helping hands, giving time and money, without other reward than the satisfaction such acts bring to a kind heart--of them, surely there is One who will keep record.
I see other signs of the millennium. In Massachusetts they have Evening Lectures for the benefit of the convicts in the State Prison. I shall never forget my tour through a State Prison, one bright summer day. The hopeless faces of the men in the workshops. Their sullen looks when by twos they marched in long procession across the yard, under guard, to their dinner. I shall never forget the poor wretches in the carding-room, breathing all day, and every day, the little fuzzy, floating particles, which set me coughing painfully the moment I entered the door; and when I asked the attendant if it did not injure their lungs, the cool matter-of-fact manner in which he answered, "Yes--they didn't live very long." I remember well the horrid, contracted cells, against whose walls I know I should have dashed out my brains, were I locked in long enough. And well too could I understand what a horror Sunday must be, imprisoned there, _all_ day, with only the interval of an hour of church; alone with torturing memories; till they prayed for the light of Monday morning and work--work!--ever so _hard_ work, so that it only brought contact and companionship with their kind, speechless though it were.