She heard
His name often. He represented all of the happiness and comfort she had
ever known and one day with all the eagerness of an awakened soul she
said, "I love Him." They told her what changes must come in the life of
a girl who said those words and meant them, for they had seen the faults
in her and they were many. She was undaunted by all they said she must
do, and answered in her uncouth fashion, "I'd die doin' them fur Him."
They wanted her to leave the mill but she said no, one of the girls was
leaving and she was to have her place with lighter work. She wanted to
go back and tell the girls some things, she said.
Not three years have passed but Mary D---- is a new girl. She is
attractive; one can scarcely believe unless he has seen it. She is
clean; she is happy. Her friends secured a position for her father
out-of-doors where he had loved to work as a boy. Mary took him to the
Mission and there he promised to begin the fight against his enemy. The
men in the Mission helped. Regular pay made a decent home possible. They
have begun to live.
Overcome by the effects of ignorance and sin, failures as citizens, as
individuals, as human souls, they met a _Person_ and life was
transformed. If it were possible to replace in every factory for Mary
D---- who assented to the facts but passed them by as having nothing to
do with her, Mary D---- who met a Person and loved Him what a world of
new moral forces we could create!
He was revealed to Mary D---- not in the abstract which could not
impress her but in the concrete which she understood.
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