Child Confidence Outraged
By Mrs. E. M Adams
CHARLIE has always been “mother’s boy.” He runs to mother with everything. One day he repeats to her some story he has heard at the barber-shop, livery-stable, hotel, or street corner, that shocks and outrages all her womanhood. What! her boy hearing and repeating such filth! She looks at him in consternation. “Now see here!” she exclaims, “don’t you ever let me hear of your listening to such stuff again! I am ashamed of you!” All right, madam; that settles it. You will hear no more. Charlie goes away abashed, half injured, half ashamed, but wholly estranged. Mother will not hear everything now, but—there are others—companions and confidants, who never repulse him, who never hear nor tell too much, who are never ashamed. The golden cord is broken. No more free confidences with mother; no anchor; the boy is adrift on the stormy sea of youthful passion, of which he is ignorant, or has wrong ideas. As time passes, Charlie has low associates, his health is impaired, his fair name disgraced. His mother’s heart is broken. Weeping, she prays, “O, why has this blow fallen on me? All my fond hopes dashed down! And I reared him so carefully!” Poor mother, she did not know. When Charlie came so confidingly to her with that first unclean story, she was to him the embodiment of all love and all wisdom. Mother might have kept him. Mother might have helped him. Mother might have told him all the clean, sacred, glorious truth, and taught him to win the crown of a pure manhood, to be “a brother of girls,” a respecter and protector of womanhood, who could give at the marriage altar honor for honor, purity for purity, and reverently share with God the divine attribute of fatherhood. Alas! “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.”—Purity Association.