My Mother’s Voice

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Jun 7, 1877

My Mother’s Voice.

A FRIEND told me not long ago, a beautiful story about kind words. A good lady passed a drinking saloon just as the keeper was thrusting a young man into the street. He was quite young and very pale, but his haggard face and wild eyes told that he was far gone in the road to ruin, and with an oath he brandished his clenched fists, threatening to be revenged on the man who had ill-used him. This young man was so excited and blinded with passion, that he did not see the lady who stood very near to him, until she laid her hand on his arm, and spoke in her gentle, loving voice, and asked him what was the matter.

At the first kind word he started as if a heavy blow had struck him, and turned quickly round paler than before, and trembling from head to foot. He surveyed the lady for a moment, and then with a sigh of relief he said:—

“I thought that was my mother’s voice, it sounded strangely like! But her voice has been hushed in death these many years.”

“You had a mother then, and she loved you,” said she.

With that sudden revulsion of feeling which often comes to people of fine nervous temperaments, the young man burst into tears and sobbed out, “Oh yes, I had an angel mother and she loved her boy! But since she died all the world has been against me; and I am lost to honor, lost to decency, and lost forever!”

“No, not lost forever; for God is merciful, and his pitying love can reach the chief of sinners,” said the lady in her soft, sweet voice; and the timely words swept the hidden chords of feeling which had long been untouched in the young man’s heart, thrilling it with magic power, and wakening a host of tender emotions, which had been buried deep beneath the rubbish of sin and crime.

More gentle words the lady spoke, and when she passed on her way the young man followed her. He marked the house she entered, and wrote the name which was on the silver door-plate, in his memorandum book. Then he went slowly away with a very earnest look on his pale face, and a deeper and more earnest feeling in his heart.

Years glided by, and the gentle lady had quite forgotten the incident we have related, when one day a stranger sent up his card, and desired to speak with her.

Wondering who it could be, she went down to the parlor, where she found a noble-looking, well-dressed man, who rose deferentially to meet her. Holding out his hand, he said:

“Pardon me, madam, for this intrusion; but I have come many miles to thank you for the great service you rendered me a few years ago,” said he, in a trembling voice.

The lady was puzzled, and asked for an explanation, as she did not remember ever having seen the gentleman before.

“I have changed so much,” said the man, “that you have quite forgotten me; but though I only saw your face once, I am sure I should have recognized it anywhere. And your voice, too, is so like my mother’s.”

These last words made the lady remember the young man she had kindly spoken to in front of the drinking saloon so long before, and the tears flowed freely,—both wept. After the first gush of emotion had subsided,—the gentleman told the lady how those few gentle words had been instrumental in saving him, and making him what he was then.

“The earnest expression of ‘No, not lost forever,’ followed me wherever I went,” said he, “and it always seemed that it was the voice of my mother speaking to me from the tomb. I repented of my many transgressions, and resolved to live in Jesus as my mother would have been pleased to have had me; and by the mercy and grace of God I have been enabled to resist temptation, and keep my good resolutions.”

“I never dreamed there was such power in a few kind words before,” exclaimed the lady, “and surely, ever after this I shall take more pains to speak them to all the sad and suffering ones I meet in the walks of life.”