"because he hath set his love upon me."
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 suggesti
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