able
ministers to guide the work of their people in the best channels, and
it would save them, moreover, from the discouragements of the
conscientious worker who is striving to improve social conditions
without any clear conception of the scope and limitations of such
service. There are many clergymen whose experience and opportunities
for study fit them for leadership in an attempt to establish systematic
training, in the seminaries. A demand from the laity for more
experienced direction in church charity would also help to hasten the
introduction of regular seminary courses in applied philanthropy.

[1] "Charities Review," Vol. II, pp. 26 _sq_.

[2] "Occasional Papers of the London Charity Organization Society," p.
35.

[3] Miss Pickton in London "Charity Organization Review," Vol. X, p.
538.

{179}

CHAPTER XI

THE FRIENDLY VISITOR

I have tried to make a number of specific suggestions in the foregoing
pages, but it is needless to say that only a few of these are likely to
be useful to any one visitor, and it would be fatal to apply them all
to one family. In the effort to be specific, I fear that I may have
been as exasperating as the cook-books, which, in a similar effort,
will suggest, "take a salamander," or "take a slip of endive," when
neither is obtainable. Cook-books have their modest uses, however, and
the cooks who are most skilful in skipping recipes not intended for
them will turn the others to the best account.

In avoiding the danger of representing friendly visiting as a pleasant
diversion, I may have gone to the other extreme, and represented it
rather as an arduous and {180} exacting profession. It is so far from
being this, that professional visiting can never be friendly. In fact,
friendly visiting is not any of the things already described in this
book. It is not wise measures of relief; it is not finding employment;
it is not getting the children in school or training them for work; it
is not improving sanitary arrangements and caring for the sick; it is
not teaching cleanliness or economical cooking or buying; it is not
enforcing habits of thrift or encouraging healthful recreations. It
may be a few of these things, or all of them, but it is always
something more. Friendly visiting means intimate and continuous
knowledge of and sympathy with a poor family's joys, sorrows, opinions,
feelings, and entire outlook upon life. The visitor that has this is
unlikely to bl