who know nothing of the infinite help of religion? Then I commend to
them Hannah, the pious mother of Samuel. Do not think it is absolutely
impossible that your children may come up iniquitous. Out of just such
fair brows and bright eyes, and soft hands, and innocent hearts, crime
gets its victims--extirpating purity from the heart, and rubbing out
the smoothness from the brow, and quenching the lustre of the eye, and
shriveling up and poisoning and putrefying and scathing and scalding
and blasting and burning with shame and woe.
Every child is a bundle of tremendous possibilities; and whether that
child shall come forth to life, its heart attuned to the eternal
harmonies, and, after a life of usefulness on earth, go to a life of
joy in heaven; or whether across it shall jar eternal discords, and,
after a life of wrong-doing on earth, it shall go to a home of
impenetrable darkness and an abyss of immeasurable plunge, is being
decided by nursery song and Sabbath lesson and evening prayer and walk
and ride and look and frown and smile. Oh, how many children in glory,
crowding all the battlements, and lifting a million-voiced hosanna,
brought to God through Christian parentage!
One hundred and twenty clergymen were together, and they were telling
their experience and their ancestry; and of the one hundred and twenty
clergymen, how many of them, do you suppose, assigned as the means of
their conversion the influence of a Christian mother? One hundred out
of the one hundred and twenty! Philip Doddridge was brought to God by
the Scripture lesson on the Dutch tiles of a chimney fireplace. The
mother thinks she is only rocking a child, but at the same time she
may be rocking the fate of nations, rocking the glories of heaven. The
same maternal power that may lift the child up may press a child down.