And oh, how many never learn this!
Go, and converse with the wise and good, and they will tell you of
their mothers' teachings; go to the condemned criminal, whose crimes
have cast him from society, and ask him why he is thus--and he will
tell you he disregarded the teachings of his mother; or, 'I had a
wicked and vicious mother, who taught me evil instead of good;' or, 'I
had no mother, to plant in my childhood's heart the fear of God and
the love of virtue.'
Here, to me, to-night, in grateful memory, comes the Sabbath morning
in the garden at the home of my childhood, more than sixty years ago,
when this dead mother here sleeping pointed to the drunken man passing
on the highway, and, kindly looking up into my face, asked me to look
at him, and, when he had passed out of sight, said: "My child, will
you here, this beautiful morning of God's day, promise your mother
that you will not drink one drop of ardent spirits until you are
twenty-one years of age? You are so full of animal spirits, I fear,
should you touch it at all, that you will come to drink to excess, and
fill a drunkard's grave before you shall have passed half the days
allotted to man's life.
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