This 19th century "missionary" song falls into the category of being so "bad" that I used to sing it in college as a shocking comic ditty. Now much older I'm frankly outraged that the editors of this songbook were seriously printing stuff like this to be learned by little children. What a weird world! Still some social anthropologist may find this song useful as an example of 19th century WASP ethnocentricity. Pity I can't paste in the steel engraving that illustrates this song.


THE HEATHEN MOTHER
(In Songs for the Little Ones at Home by the American Tract Society in 1852)

See that heathen mother stand
Where the sacred current flows;
With her own maternal hand
Mid the waves her babe she throws.

Hark! I hear the piteous scream;
Frightful monsters seize their prey,
Or the dark and bloody stream
Bears the struggling child away.

Fainter now, and fainter still,
Breaks the cry upon the ear;
But the mother's heart is steel,
She unmoved that cry can hear.

Send, O send the Bible there,
Let its precepts reach the heart;
She may then her children spare—
Act the mother's tender part.

—Hastings' "Nursery Songs."

I sing this one to a tune varient of "East Virginia."

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Songs for the Little Ones at Home