The Women Workers of the Episcopal Church
By LOUISA A. NASH
THE Episcopal Church could hardly have found its present firm footing in the Pacific Coast States but for the women who helped to pioneer it. Sometimes the clergyman's wife helped with a church school (as in Corvallis, Or.), which was to become the nucleus of a strong church. Latterly, the rector's wife at the All-Saints' Mission, Portland, won the way to the hearts of the people through the kindergarten attached to her own home. Often the little church building has been seen standing in the small country town, awaiting its rector, while its guild of faithful women kept alive the Sunday school for months, and their busy lingers worked to make all things ready against the arrival of an unknown but welcome rector.
Is there a debt hanging over the church, or a deficit for the running expenses, or is there repair needed?—the Woman's Guild is every ready for the emergency. Their inventive genius can always coin money by one method or another.
While $750 (as the figures of Trinity, Portland, show) seems a large sum for a city church, yet in the little country parish $40 or $50 represents the same degree of zeal and diligence.
The Woman's Guild usually confines itself to home help. A bazaar is often the nest egg for a small outlying chapel, when it has to content itself perhaps with but a monthly service. Substantial gifts gladden the local hospitals at Thanksgiving and Christmas, as well as at other times.
The "Daughters," sometimes called the "King's Daughters." sometimes after their own particular church, emulate the matrons in their church ministries; and, like them, not scorning the humbler work of cleaning and lighting fires in God's house. They raise money, and they save money by what they gladly do with their own hands. They teach in the mission kindergartens, and start the children's societies in the right direction.
The children, whether called the "Sunbeams," the "Young Helpers" or "Little Workers," piece their quilts, voting, when complete, whether the home hospital, or the half-frozen Alaskan Mission, is to receive them. They are pretty sure to wish the Arctic Mission School to have it, even if it takes six months to reach its destination. Each Christmas the "Juniors" of Seattle (where naturally Alaskan interest is strong) send a box to the Sunday School of Ketchikan. The first child's cot of the Good Samaritan Hospital, Portland, was started in the small Sunday School of Corvallis, about twenty years ago. Every Christmas since the Sunday Schools throughout the state have contributed to this object, and there are now with Bishop Morris' help three or four cots in perpetuity ready to receive the tiny sufferers brought there for treatment. One of the children's societies worked until it had
