We speak about a man as if he were self-contained—just standing upon so much ground, without relation behind or before, on the right hand or on the left. But no man is thus insularly placed; no man is an absolute solitary.
Every man has in him the blood of the past and the life of the future.
Can a son of a good mother be altogether bad? Most surely not. You must have mistaken the case if you thought so. Your very thinking so may constitute an element of hopefulness in your case. Take comfort from that suggestion.
So long as you can think of yourself seriously and of the past and of your advantages, and can compare what you are with what you might have been, there is hope of you.
But can there be in all history such an irony as this, that a man should have had a praying mother and himself be a prayerless man?
No! It can not be. Somewhere—at some time and in some way—the better nature will assert itself, and out of a good seed surely there will come a good harvest.
But the lesson does not lie upon one side only. Here is encouragement to the praying fathers and to praying mothers.
Zachariah, read on; read between the lines of things; interpret events symbolically; read the apocalyptic sense of what is happening—and out of all this mental elevation and spiritual conduct there will come results in your daughter or your son.
Abi, pray on. Be just to your father’s memory, and say: “He was a holy man. I must prove it by being a holy woman. He can not live upon a written character; he must live in my life. I will prove that such a child must have had a good father.”