Is it not a grotesque civilization which sends missionaries across the sea to save the souls of the heathen, and yet permits conditions at home that debauch the children at our very doors?
Interpretation
This quote critiques the hypocrisy of a society that is eager to assist others abroad while neglecting its own issues.
Edwin Markham's quote highlights the absurdity of a civilization that prioritizes sending missionaries to 'save' distant populations while turning a blind eye to the moral and social decay occurring within its own borders, particularly as it affects vulnerable children. It urges reflection on the values of society and questions the sincerity of its philanthropic efforts when local problems remain unaddressed.
In practice
In a speech about community service, one might introduce this quote to discuss the importance of addressing local social issues.
Greed and Gain, grim guardians of the great god Mammon, continually cry in the ears of the poor, 'Give us your little ones!' And forever do the poor push out their little ones at the imperious ukase, feeding the children to a blind Hunger that is never filled.
Sorrows come to stretch out places in the heart for joy.
There is a destiny which makes us brothers; none goes his way alone. All that we send into the lives of others comes back into our own.
The crest and crowning of all good, life's final star, is Brotherhood.
He drew a circle that shut me out- Heretic , rebel, a thing to flout. But love and I had the wit to win: We drew a circle and took him In ! From the poem " Outwitted
The sequoias belong to the silences of the milleniums. Many of them have seen a hundred human generations rise, give off their little clamors and perish. They seem indeed to be forms of immortality standing here amoing the transitory shapes of time.
All religions bear traces of the fact that they arose during the intellectual immaturity of the human race - before it had learned the obligations to speak the truth. Not one of them makes it the duty of its god to be truthful and understandable in his communications.
The first woman was created from the rib of a man. She was not made from his head to top him, nor from his feet to be trampled on by him, but out of his side to be equal to him.
Nothing exists for itself alone, but only in relation to other forms of life
The West may collapse very suddenly. Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos.
The soul, who is lifted by a very great and yearning desire for the honor of God and the salvation of souls, begins by exercising herself, for a certain space of time, in the ordinary virtues, remaining in the cell of self-knowledge, in order to know better the goodness of God towards her.
The end of the First World War had thrown Germany's youth into great turmoil. The reins of power had fallen from the hands of a deeply disillusioned older generation, and the younger ones drew together in larger and smaller groups to blaze new paths or, at least, to discover a new star to steer by.
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