The Bossier banner. [volume] (Bellevue, Bossier Parish, La.) 1859-1952, 1888-03-29

this life before / began it, / have heard OF
her faith in God, that brought all of her
| children into the kingdom, and two of
them into the ministry, and then brought
all her grandchildren into the kingdom,
myself the last and least worthy. Is il
not time that you and 1 do two things,
swing open a picture gallery of the
wrinkled faces and stopped shoulders of
the past, and call down from their
Heavenly thrones the jgodly grandmoth.
ers to give them our thanks, and then
| persuade the mothers of to-day that they
are living for all time, and that against
| the sides Of every cradle in which a child
| is rocked beat the two eternities?
Here we have an untried, undiscussed
and unexplored subject. You often hear
| about your influence upon your children
am not talking about that. What about
your influence upon the twentieth cent
| ury. upon the thirtieth century, upon the
| fortieth century, upon the year two thou
sand, upon the year four thousand, if the
world lasts SO long? The world stood four
thousand years before Christ came; it is
not unreasonable to suppose that it may
stand four thousand years after His ar
| rival. Four thousand years the world
swung off in sin; four thousand years it
may be swinging back into righteousness.
By the ordinary rate of mul duplication of
the worlds population, in a century your
descendants will be over six hundred, and
by two centuries at least over one hun
cred thousand, perhaps two hundred thou
sand, and upon every one of them you,
the mother of to-day, will have an lnflu-
ence for good or evil. And if in two
centuries your descendants shall have
with their names filled a scroll of hun
dreds Of thousands, will some angel
from Heaven to whom is given the
capacity to calculate the number
Of the stars Of Heaven and the sands of
the seashore, step down and tell us how
many descendants you will have in the
four thousandth year of the worlds pos.
sible continuance? Do not let the grand
mothers 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, the
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 inhue upon one nursery. You
have been thinking of the Importance of
getting these 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 octo.
genarian. That is well, but my subject
sweeps thousand years, million years,
quadrilion of years. can not stop at
one cradle, I am look ing at the cradles
that reach all round the world and across
all time. l am not talking of Mother
Eunice, l am talking of Grandmother
Lois. The only way you can tell the force
of current is by sailing up stream; or
the force OF an ocean wave, by running
the ship against it. Running along with
1t we can not appreciate the force. In
estimating maternal influence we gen.
orally run along with it down the stream
of time, and so we don't understand the
full force. Let US come up to it from the
eternity side, after it has been working
on for centuries, and see all the good
it has done and all the evil it
has accomplished, multiplied in mag
nificent or appalling compound
interest. The difference between that
mothers influence on her children now
and the influence when it has been multi
the difference between the Mississippi
river way up at the top of the con tinent,
starting from the little Lake Itasca, seven
miles long and one wide, and it's mouth at
the Gulf Of Mexico, where navies might
ride. Betwee n the birth of that river and
its burial in the sea the Missouri pours
III, ana 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 a mothers influence, we need to
come in off the ocean of eternity and sail
up towards the one cradle, and we will
find 10000 tributaries of influence pour
ing in and pouring down.
Ii mother tell a child he Is not good,
some bugaboo will come and catch him.
the fear excited may make the child
coward, and the fact that he finds that
there is no bugaboo may make him a liar,
and the echo of that false alarm may be
heard after fifteen generations have been
born and have expired. IT mother prom
ise child a reward for good behavior,
and after the good behavior forgets to
give the reward, the cheat may crop out
in some faithlessness half thousand
years further on. If mother culture a
child's vanity, and eulogize his curls, and
extol the night-black, or blue, or nut
brown of the child's eyes, and call out in
his presence the admiration of spectators,
pride and arrogance may be prolonged
after half a dozen family records have
been obliteratsd. If mother express
doubt about some statement of the Holy
Bible in child's presence, long after the
gates of this historical era have closed and
the gates of another era have opened,
the result may be seen in champion
biasphemer But on the other hand, if a
mother walking with child see a suffer-
ing one by the waysde and says: esMy
child, give that ten-cent piece to that
lame boy" the result may be seen on the
other side of the following century in
some George Mullen building whole
village OF orphanages. If mother sit al
most every evening by the trunille bed of
child and teach it lessonslof a Saviour's
example, of the importance of truth and
the horror of a lie, and the virtues of in.
dustry and kindness and sympathy and |
seif-sacrifice, long after the mother has |
gone and the child has gone and the let |
Ter ing on both the tombstones shall have |
been he'd ont bxy he et1,r,-