Connecticut western news., 1898-10-13

ternltl6S!
 Cradles Across All Time.
 Here we have an untried. unlicensed md unexplored subject. You often hear Ibout your influence upon your own ,hildren. I am not talking about that. What about your influence upon the twentieth century, upon the thirtieth century, upon the fortieth century, up- ,n the year 2000, upon the year 4000, f the world lasts so longf The world tood 4,000 years before Christ came. It is not unreasonable to suppose that t may stand 4,000 years after his ar .ival. Four thousand years the world swung off in sin, 4, 900 years 1t may be ,winging back into righteousness By he ordinary rate of multiplication of he worlds population in 8 century your descendants will be over 300, and by two centuries over 50, GOO, and upon every one of them you, the mother of today, will have an influence for good or evil. And if in four centuries your descendants shall have with their names filled a scroll of hundreds of thousands will some angel from heaven.sfo 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 possible continuance? Do not let the grandmothers any longer think that they are retired and sit clear back out of sight from the world. feeling that they have no relation to 1t. The moth CTS of the last century arc today. in the person of their desoendants in the sen- ates, the .parliaments. the palaces, the pulpits, the banking houses, the profes- sional chairs, the prisons, the aims houses, the company of midnight brig ands, the cellars, the ditches of this century. You have been thinking about the importance of having the right in fuence upon one nursery. You have been thinking of the importance of get ting those two little feet on the right path. You have been thinking of your child's destiny for the next 80 years if it should pass on to be an octogenarian. That is we'll, but my subject sweeps a thousand years, 8 million years, of years. cannot stop at one cradle; I am looking at the cradles that reach all around the world and across all time. I am not talking of Mother Eunice. lam talking of Grand mother 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 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 under stand the full forQa 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 multiplied in hundreds of thousands of lives is the difference between the Mississippi river away up at the top of the continent starting from the little Lake Itasca, seven miles long and one wide, and its mouth at the gulf of Mexico, where na- vies 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 the Yazoo rivers pour in, and all the states and territo- ries between the Alleghany and Rocky mountains make contribution. Now, in order to test the power of mothers influence, we need to come in off the ocean of eternity and sail up toward the one cradle, and we will find 10000 tributaries of influence pouring in and pouring down. But it is, after all, one great river of power rolling on and roll ing 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 elevat- ing their example? Had they not better be rousing themselves with the consid- eration 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 dried up, and the last flake of the ashes of consumed world shall have been blown away, and aN the tele- scopes 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 granite column 36 square feet in size, which is thought by the natives to decide the worlds continuance. An angel with robe spun from zephyrs is once oen- tlfy 10 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 thst process that granite column would be worn out of existence before moth- ers' influence will begin to give way.
 On the Great Divide.
 If mother tell child if he is not good some bugaboo will come and batch him, the fear excited may make the child a 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 15 generations have been born and have expired. Ifa moth or promises child reward for good behavior and after the good behavior fcrgets to give the reward, the cheat may crop out in some faithlessness half thousand years further on. If a mother
 cultivate g. ohild's vanity and eulogize
 his curls and extol the night black or
 sky blue or nut brown 6 the child' 2 eyes and call out in his presence the ad- miration of spectators, pride and arro- gance may be prolonged after half g dozen family records have been obliter- ated. If a mother express doubt about some statement of the Holy Bible in a 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 blas- phemer; but, on the other hand, if a mother walking with child see suf- fering one by the wayside and gays, My child, give that 10 cent piece to that lame boy" the result may be seen on the other side of the following oen- tury. in some George Mullar building . whole village of orphanageG If a mother