The Stark County Democrat. [volume] (Canton, Ohio) 1833-1912, 1888-03-08

four thousand years before Christ came;
II is not unreasonRbly TO suppose that it
may stand four thousand years after his
arrival. Four thousand years the world
swung off in sin; four Thousand years it
may be swinging back into righteousness.
By the ordinary rate of multiplication OF
the worlds population, in a century your
decendRnts will be over six hundred, and
by two centuries at least over hundred
thousand, perhaps two hundred thousand,
and upon every one Of them you, the
mother of to-day, will have an influence
for good or evil. And if in two centuries
your descendants shall have with their
names filed a scroll OF hundreds Of
thousands, will some angel from
Heaven, to whom is given the Ca
pacity to calculate the number of the
stars of Heaven and the sands Of the sea-
shore, step down and tell us how many
descendants you will have in the four
thousandth year of the worlds possible
continuance. Do not let the grandmoth-
ers any longer think that they are retired,
and sit clear back out of sight from the
world, feeling that they have no relation
to it. The mothers of the last century are
to-day in the Senates, Parliaments, the
palaces, the pulpits, the banking houses,
the professional chairs, the prisons, the
almshouses, the company OF midnight
brigands, the cellars, the bitches of this
century. You have been thinking about
the importance OF having the right influ-
ence upon one nursery. You have been
linking of the Importance of getting those
two little feet on the right path. You have
been thinking of your child's destiny for
the next eighty years, if it should pass on
to be an octogenarian. That is we'll; but
my subject sweeps q thousand
yers, million years, quadrill-
ion of years. cannot stop at one
cradle, am looking at the cradles that
reach all round the world and across all
time. | am not talking Of Mother Eunice,
am talking of Grandmother Lois.
The only way you can tell the
force of current is by sailing up stream;
or TIE force of an ocean wave, by running
the ship against it. Running along with
it we cannot appreciate the force. In esti-
mating maternal influence we generally
run along with it down the stream of
tune, and so we don't understand the full
force. Let as come up to it from the eter-
nifty side, after it has been working for
centuries, and see all the good it has done
and all the evil it has accomplished multi
piled in magnificent or appalling COM
pound interest. The difference between
and the influence when it has been multi
piled in hundreds of thousands of lives, is
the difference between the Mississippi
River way up at the top of the continent,
starting from the little Lake ltasca, seven
miles long and one wide, and its mouth at
the Gulf of Mexico, where navies might
ride. Between the birth of that river and
its burial in the sea the Missouri pours in,
and the Ohio pours in, and the Arkansas
pours in, and the Red and White and
Yazoo Rivers pour in, and all the states
and territories between the Allegheny and
Rocky Mountains make contribution. Now,
in order to test the power Of mothers
influence, we need to come in off of the
ocean of eternity and sail up toward
the one cradle, and we will find
ten thousand tributaries of influence
pouring in and pouring down. But it is
after all one great river of power rolling
on and rolling forever. Who can fathom
it? Who can bridge it2 Who can stop itp
Had not mothers better be intensifying
their prayers2 Had they not better be
eevating their example? Hal they not
better be rousing themselves with the con-
sideration that by their faithfulness OF
neglect they are starting an influence
which will be stupendous after the last
mountain of earth is flat, and the last sea
has been dried up, and the last flake of the
ashes of a consumed world shall have been
blown away, and all the telescopes of other
worlds directed to the track around which
our world once swung shall discover not so
much as a cinder of the burned-down and
swept-off planet In Ceylon there is q
granite column thirty-six square feet in
szo, which is thought by the natives to de-
eide the worlds continuance. An angel
with robe spun from zephyrs is once GEN.
tury to descend and sweep the hem of that
robe across the granite, and when by that
attrition the column is worn away they say
time will end. But by that process that
granite column would be worn out of exist
ence before a mothers influence will begin
to give away.
II a mother tell child he is not good,
some bugaboO will come and catch him,
the ear excited may make the child cow
ard, and the fact that he finds that there is
no bugaboo may make him liar, and the
echo of that false alarm may be heard
after fifteen generations have been born
and have expired. If mother promise a
child a reward for good behavior and after
the good behavior forgets to give the re"
ward, the cheat may crop out in some
faithlessness half thousand years further
on. If mother culture q child's vanity
and eulogize his curls, and eXol the night
| black or sky-blue or nut-brown of the
rhild's eyes, and call out in his presence
the admiration of spectators, pride 'asnd ig-
nornnce may be prolonged after half o
| dozen family records have been obllterated.
| II a mother express doubt about some
statement of the Holy Bible in a childs
| presence, long after the gates Of this his
! toricll era have closed and the gates of an
other era have opened, the result may be
seen in a champion blasphemer. But, on
the other hand, if a mother walking
with o child see suffering one
| by the wayside and says: "My
child, give that lO-cent piece to that lame
boy" the result may be seen on the other
side of the following century in some
George Muller building a whole village of
orphanages. II mother sit almost every
evening by the trundle-bed Of a child and
teach it lessons of SaViour's love and a
Sayiours example, of the importance of
truth and the horror Of lie, and the
virtues of industry and kindness and sym,
pathy and elf-sacriice, long after the
mother has gone and the child has gone,
and the lettering on both the tomstones
shall have been washed out by the storms
Of innumerRble winters, there may be
standing, as q result Of those trundle- bed
lessons, flaming evangels, world moving
reformers, circulating Summerfelds, weep
ing Pavsons, laundering Whitehelds,
emancipating Washingtons.