Some years ago I heard of a poor woman who sent her boy to school and
college. When he was to graduate, he wrote his mother to come, but she
sent back word that she could not because her only skirt had already
been turned once. She was so shabby that she was afraid he would be
ashamed of her. He wrote back that he didn't care how she was dressed,
and urged so strongly that she went. He met her at the station, and
took her to a nice place to stay. The day came for his graduation, and
he walked down the broad aisle with that poor mother dressed very
shabbily, and put her into one of the best seats in the house. To her
great surprise he was the valedictorian of the class, and he carried
everything before him. He won a prize, and when it was given to him,
he stepped down before the whole audience, and kissed his mother, and
said:
"Here, mother, here is the prize. It is yours. I would not have had it
if it had not been for you."
Thank God for such a man!
The one glimpse the Bible gives us of thirty out of the thirty-three
years of Christ's life on earth shows that He did not come to destroy
this fifth commandment. The secret of all those silent years is
embodied in that verse in Luke's Gospel--"And He went down with them
and came to Nazareth, and was subject to them." Did He not set an
example of true filial love and care when in the midst of the agonies
of the cross He mode provision for His mother? Did He not condemn the
miserable evasions of this law by the Pharisees of His own day:
"Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, This
people honoreth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.
But in vain do they worship me, teaching as their doctrines the
precepts of men. . . . Full well do ye reject the commandment of God,
that ye may keep your tradition. For Moses said, Honor thy father and
thy mother; and, He that speaketh evil of father or mother, let him
die the death; but ye say, If a man shall say to his father or his
mother, That wherewith thou mightest have been profited by me, is
Corban, (that is to say, Given to God), ye no longer suffer him to do
aught for his father or his mother: making void the word of God by
your tradition, which ye have delivered."
I have read of one heathen custom in China, which would do us credit
in this so-called Christian country. On every New Year's morning each
man and boy, from the emperor to the lowest peasant, is said to pay a
visit to his mother, carrying her a present varying in value according
to his station in life. He thanks her for all she has done for him,
and asks a continuance of her favor another year. Abraham Lincoln used
to say: "All I have I owe to my mother."
I would rather die a hundred deaths than have my children grow up to
treat me with scorn and contempt. I would rather have them honor me a
thousand times over than have the world honor me. I would rather have
their esteem and favor than the esteem of the whole world. And any man
who seeks the honor and esteem of the world, and doesn't treat his
parents right, is sure to be disappointed: