The morning news. [volume] (Savannah, Ga.) 1887-1900, 1888-02-27

Uty, ana Jnen brought All HSI SIHuuCillllTeu
into the kingdom myself the last and least
worthy. Is it not time that You and | Ito
two things, swing open picture gallery of
the wrinkled faces and stopped shoulders of
the past, and call down from their heavenly
thrones the godly grandmothers, 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 child is rocked beat the
two eternitieS.
Here we have an untried, undiscusSed and
uneXplored subject You often hear about
your influence upon your own children-I
am not talking about that. What about
your influence upon the twentieth century,
npon the thirtieth century, upon the for
tieth century. upon the year two thousand,
upon the year four thousand, if the world
lasts SO long. The world stood four thou
sand years before Christ came; it is not UNI
reasonable 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 popu-
latiOn in century your descendants 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 filled a scroll of hundreds 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 Ill
the four thousandth year of
the worlds possible continuance.
Do not let the grandmothers any longer
~. IL Il,
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 com
pany of midnight brigands, the cellars, the
bitches of this century. You have been
thinking about the Importance of having
the right influence upon one nursery. You
have been thinking 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 well, but my subject sweeps thou
sand years, a million years, a quadrillion of
years. | cannot stop at one cradle, |
am looking at the cradles that
reach all round the world and across
all time. l am not talking of
l.
mother Lois. The only way you can tell
the force Of a current is by sailing up
stream; or the force of an ocean wave, by
running the ship against il. Running along
with it we cannot appreciate the force. In
estimating maternal influence we generally
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,
op1 all fhn trnnd II hos 6Ona an6 oil 10
evil it has accomplished multiplied in mag
nifcent or appalling compound interest.
The difference between that mothers in
fuence on her children now and the in
f1uence when it has been multiplied in hun
dreds of thousands of lives. is the difference
between the Mississippi river way up at the
top of the continent, 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. 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 be-
tween 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 it? Who can stop it Had
not mothers better be intensifying their
prayers Had they not better be elevating
their example Had they not better be
rousing themselves with the consideration
that by their faithfulness or neglect
they are starting an influence which will be
stupendous after the last mountain of earth
is fiat. and the last sea has been dried up,
and the last fake 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 Gin
der of the burned-down and swept-oR
planet. In Ceylon there is a granite col
umn thirty-six square feet in size, which is
thought by the natives to decide the worlds
continuance. An angel with robe spun
from zephyrs is once century to descend
and sweep the hem of that robe across the
granite, and when by that attrition the col
umn is worn away they say time will end.
But by that process that granite column
would be worn out of existence before
mothers influence will begin to give away.
If a mother tell a child he is not good,
some bugaboo will come and catch him, tine
fear excited maymake the child coward and
the fact that he finds that there is no buga-
boo may make him liar, and the echo of
that false alarm may be heard after fifteen
generations have been born and have ex-
pired. If a mother promise child a re-
ward 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 q
mother cultures a child's vanity and eulo-
gize his curls and extol the night-black or
sky-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 dozen family records
have been oblterated. If a mother express
doubt about some statement of the
Holy Bible in a chlld's pres
ence, long after the gates of
this historical era have closed and the gates
of another era have opened, the result may
be seen in a champion blasphemer. But, on
the other hand if a mother walking with a
child see a suffering one by the wayside and
says: "My child, give that ten cent piece TO
that lame boy,n the result may be seen on
the other side of tho following century in
some George Muller building whole viii
lage of orphansges. II a mother sit almost
every evening Icy the trundle bed OF child
and teach il lessons of Saviour's love and
a Saviours example, of the Importance of
truth and the horror of a lie, and the vir-
tues of industry and kindness and sympa-
thy and self-sacriice, long after the mother
has gone and the child has gone and the let
tering on both the tombstones shall have
leon xyaghed ont nv the storma of innumer-