I have seen the sorrow of a godless mother on the death of a child she
had neglected. It was not so much grief that she felt from the fact
that the child was dead as the fact that she had neglected it. She
said: "If I had only watched over and cared for the child, I know God
would not have taken it." The tears came not; it was a dry, blistering
tempest--a scorching simoon of the desert. When she wrung her hands it
seemed as if she would twist her fingers from their sockets; when she
seized her hair it seemed as if she had, in wild terror, grasped a
coiling serpent with her right hand.
No tears! Comrades of the little one came in and wept over the coffin;
neighbors came in, and the moment they saw the still face of the child
the shower broke. No tears for her. God gives tears as the summer rain
to the parched soul; but in all the universe the driest and hottest,
the most scorching and consuming thing is a mother's heart if she has
neglected her child, when once it is dead. God may forgive her, but
she will never forgive herself. The memory will sink the eyes deeper
into the sockets, and pinch the face, and whiten the hair, and eat up
the heart with vultures that will not be satisfied, forever plunging
deeper their iron beaks. Oh, you wanderers from your home, go back to
your duty! The brightest flowers in all the earth are those which grow
in the garden of a Christian household, clambering over the porch of a
Christian home.