"Mothers, the nursery of your home is like the nursery where the fruit experts do their wonderful work. God has placed in your keeping these little ones. You are the expert whose business it is to see that as they grow older they will not bear the small, sour fruit of wrong living, but the large, sweet fruit of Christian service. What they are to be depends upon you. The plum tree in the woods could not grow better of itself. It had to have help. And yet, we find mothers everywhere who seem to think that the child can develop into a high type of manhood and womanhood if he is provided with a plenty to eat and wear and with the public school and the Sunday school at his disposal.
"Within the heart of each mother God has implanted a natural knowledge of how to care for the child. To fail to apply this knowledge is to fail to reach up to a parent's highest privilege.
"The Sunday school can do much, but we must remember that home was God's first and holiest school. It is in the home that the child receives his first and most lasting lessons. Let us not misjudge the ability of the child to perceive the inconsistency, the insincerity, of father and mother. Even though the parent be a teacher in the Sunday school, her influence cannot be for the best if her everyday life is wasted in society and unworthy amusements. The father's praise of the Bible loses its gilt edge when the boy sees him bound up in the Sunday paper for two hours, without ever finding time to read the Scriptures.
"Let us all, therefore, look at this whole matter seriously. We may each have a part in this training, this cultivating, this producing of better minds, better hands and cleaner lives, but after all, mothers, the great responsibility is yours, for it is into your hands that God has placed the children, these innocent little ones who are a type of heaven itself."
THE HOLLOW TREE
—Decision Day
—Honesty
A Figure of the Deceitful Life—The True Test of Character.
THE LESSON—That stability or weakness of character are revealed when the supreme test comes.