moral law. Yet as a strange anomaly presented by human life, there are women, and kind and well-meaning women too, who seem not to be aware that the sacred name of mother entails upon them an amount of responsibility proportioned to the influence which it places in their hands. There are mothers, and not a few, who appear to consider themselves called upon to do anything, rather than attendto the training of their children; who find time for morning calls, when they have none for the nursery or the school-room; and even make the dresses of their infants, rather than answer questions dictated by their opening minds.
It has often been said that no man, however depraved or vicious, need be utterly despaired of, with whom his mother's influence still lingers on the side of virtue. On the couch of sickness, the battle-field, and even the gloomy scaffold, it is the image of his mother which still haunts the memory of the dying man; and in the hour of strong temptation, when guilty comrades urge the treacherous or the bloody deed, it is to forget the warning of his mother's voice, that the half-persuaded victim drinks^ a deeper draught.
If in scenes like these a mother's influence is the last preserving link, how sweetly does it operate when life is new, and experience yet unsullied by any deep or lasting stains! How sweetly does it operate, like a kind of second conscience, more tender, more forgiving, yet still more appealing than the first, in all those minor perplexities and trials of human life, where judgment, bribed by inclination, would persuade the unpractised traveller, that the most flowery path must surely be the best! It is in the beginning and the end of evil, that this power, though often unseen, and purely spiritual, operates with a potency peculiarly its own—in the beginning, to win us back by that simple and habitual reference of a child to what would have been its mother's choice; and in the end, by that last lingering of expiring hope—that hovering, as it were, around our pillow, of some kind angel, reminding us at once of the tenderness of earthly love, and of the efficacy of that which is divine.
There seems to be connected with the human mind, and almost essential to its wants in this probationary state, an idea of the protection of some guardian spirit always near.
