Once there was a very beautiful city. Its streets were wide and finely paved. Its lawns were green and smooth and covered with beautiful flowers. Its houses were large and richly furnished, and all the people in it were well dressed and happy. There were magnificent churches and splendid schoolhouses. There were libraries and museums and stores of all kinds. A more beautiful and wealthy city it would be hard to find.
But all around this city lay a great black swamp, where the mud was foul and the water above it was fouler, where the trees were festering, and the air stagnant. Here and there throughout this swamp were scattered wretched huts, and the poor people that had to live in them were pale and feeble, and died in large numbers every day. And yet of all this wretchedness the people in the great city took no heed.
One day a plague broke out, starting in one of the finest of the fine houses. It spread slowly at first, and then more rapidly. The doctors were called, and did their best, but their best was useless.
Still faster sped the pest from house to house, slaying the fathers and mothers, and then the little children. They had to establish pest-houses, but these soon became crowded. They shut up those who were sick in their homes and stationed officers before the doors, letting no one pass in or out, but this did no good. At last they quarantined the entire city, taking the greatest pains to disinfect every person and every object that entered it or passed away from it, but still the plague spread.
Finally they called in a wise man from another town, and what do you think he told them? That all this trouble came from the great black swamp around the city, and from their own carelessness and selfishness in not listening to the cries of the poor people that lived there, and making it, by drainage, a healthy place to live in. The poisonous gases that had arisen from it had entered into all the beautiful homes of the fair city, and killed their thousands.
This story, children, shows you very truthfully the condition of our country. Beautiful though it is, and filled with all kinds of wealth and happiness, there is in it (and not around it, as in the story) a great black swamp—the evil lives of many hundreds of thousands that know nothing about Christ, and care nothing about right and purity. From these evil lives is constantly rising a poison, entering into the purest homes, and spoiling with its foulness all the fairness and beauty of our land.
Since this is so, you can see why we should all work and pray for home missions, for they mean nothing else than clearing out this black swamp, and making the whole country equally pure and clean.