"We are all missionaries," she commenced, "and cannot escape the
responsibility which is imposed upon us. Our duty is imperative. We
stand at the open door of opportunity and enter so slowly into the
fields of work all around us. When one sees rank bigotry and
narrow-mindedness on every hand, he feels like blushing that he ever
sent money to convert the heathen in far-away lands. The heathen at
our own doors are more blood-thirsty than the cannibals of distant
climes. I appeal to you all, noble women especially, to rid your minds
of the fallacy of foreign work and do the foreign work at home, even
inside your own doors. (Applause, principally among the men, in which
Mr. World heartily joined.) I must confess that, at one time, I was
almost overcome by this craze of evangelizing the world. My delusion
went so far that I could see visions of China, Africa, or the remote
islands of the sea, and even imagine that I heard voices calling me
thither. One night I dreamed a dream, the kindest of them all. I saw
a woman standing on the shore of a river, her children drowning at her
side. But she, unmindful of her own blood, was hastening to launch a
boat into the stream that she might rescue a sinking dog on the farther
shore.
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