When shall we learn that the great curative principle is love, that love heals because it is harmony? There can be no discord where it reigns. Love is serenity, is peace and happiness.
Love is the great disciplinarian, the supreme harmonizer, the true peacemaker. It is the great balm for all that blights happiness or breeds discontent, a sovereign panacea for malice, revenge, and all the brutal propensities. As cruelty melts before kindness, so the evil passions and their antidote in sweet charity and loving sympathy.
The mother is the supreme shaper of life and destiny.
Many a mother's love for her children has undoubtedly stayed the ravages of some fatal disease. Her conviction that she was necessary to them and her great love for them have braced her, and have enabled her to successfully cope with the enemies of her life for a long time.
One mother I know seems to have the magical art of curing nearly all the ills of her children by love. If any member of the family has any disagreeable experience, is injured or pained, hurt or unhappy, he immediately goes to the mother for the universal balm, which heals all troubles.
This mother has a way of drawing the troubled child out of discord into the zone of perpetual harmony. If he is swayed by jealousy, hatred, or anger, she applies the love solvent, the natural antidote for these passion poisons. She knows that scolding a child when he is already suffering more than he can bear is like trying to put out a fire with kerosene.
Our orphan asylums give pathetic illustration of how quickly the child mind matures and ages prematurely without the uplift and enrichment of the mother love, the mother sympathy,—parental protection and home influence.
It is well known that children who lose their parents and are adopted by their grandparents and live in the country, where they do not have an opportunity to mingle much with other children, adopt the manners and mature vocabulary of their elders, for they are very imitative, and become little men and women before they are out of their youth.
Think of a child reared in the contaminating atmosphere of the slums, where everything is dripping with suggestions of vulgarity and wickedness of every description! Think of his little mind being filled with profanity, obscenity, and filth of all kinds! Is it any wonder that he becomes so filled with vicious, criminal suggestions that he tends to become like his environment?
Contrast such a child with one that is brought up in an atmosphere of purity, refinement, and culture, and whose mind is always filled with noble, uplifting suggestions of the true, the beautiful, and the lovely. What a difference in the chances of these two children, and without any special effort or choice of their own! One mind is trained upward, towards the light, the other downward, towards darkness.