p. 131 | A MOTHER'S MAGIC

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 19, 1869

A MOTHER'S MAGIC.

The following touching and felicitous illustration of the power of ideas, was given by Wendell Phillips, a short time since in a public speech: “I was told to-day a story so touching in reference to this, that you must let me tell it. It is a temperance case, but it will illustrate this just as well. It is the story of a mother on the hills of Vermont, holding by the right hand a son of sixteen years old, mad with the love of the sea. As she stood by the garden gate one sunny morning, she said: ‘Edward, they tell me that the great temptation of a seaman's life is drink. Promise me before you quit your mother's hand, that you will never drink.’ ‘And,’ said he, for he told me the story, ‘I gave her the promise, and I went the broad globe over—Calcutta, the Mediterranean, San Francisco, the Cape of Good Hope, the North Pole and the South—I saw them all in forty years, and I never saw a glass filled with sparkling liquor that my mother's form, by the garden gate on the green hillside of Vermont, did not rise before me, and to-day, at sixty, my lips are innocent of liquor.’ Was not that sweet evidence of the power of a single word? Yet that was not half, ‘For,’ said he, ‘yesterday there came into my counting room a strong man of forty, and asked, ‘Do you know me?’ ‘No.’ ‘Well,’ said he, ‘I was once brought drunk into your presence on shipboard; you were a passenger; the captain kicked me aside; you took me to your berth and kept me there until I had slept off the intoxication; you then asked me if I had a mother. I said I never knew a word from her lips! You told me of yours at the garden gate, and to-day I am master of one of the finest packets in New York, and I came to ask you to call and see me.’” How far that little candle throws its beams! That mother's word on the green hillside of Vermont! O, God be thanked for the almighty power of a single word!—Sel.