Page:Women worth emulating (1877) Internet Archive.djvu/112

96 was right she should wish to be useful to others. Christianity is an active principle—swift, cheering, and vivifying as light.

She began, as many of our best young people begin to work for their Master, by teaching in the Sunday School. Here she found ready access to the hearts of the children of her class, and through them to their parents. Some memorable conversions through her instrumentality followed.

Then she had a strong desire to visit the poor in the workhouse. Her wish was granted; and here, too, she had almost immediate evidence that she was in the path of duty. District visitations, Bible classes and readings, home missionary activities, are all more modern plans of usefulness which existed not then; and the sight to the sick and aged poor of a kind young face bending in pity over them, and a gentle voice pleading with them and reading to them, must have been as a revelation of Heaven to many whose hold on earth had been painful and wearisome.

In the workhouse, Sarah Martinis first work was found. She did not confine her ministrations merely to the aged and the sick. She very wisely sought to do good to the children, then more likely to be trained for crime than for anything else, in our pauper houses. Any man who could read, and perhaps write a little, was selected from among the paupers as schoolmaster, irrespective of character and fitness. Of three, whom she in the course of