WOMAN'S HOME INFLUENCE by S. Frances Gilbreath-Ingersoll

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 10, 1901

WOMAN'S HOME INFLUENCE.

By S. Frances Gilbreath-Ingersoll

S. FRANCES GILBREATH-INGERSOLL. (Middlefield, Ohio.)

Wherever man has achieved distinction, in contest of war, in fields of science or art, or in acts of high philanthropy, woman can point to notable examples among her own sex who have kept even pace with him. And yet she has done, and can do, a work beside which man's most brilliant successes pale and grow commonplace. It is essentially woman's work to make a perfect Christian home, type of the home perfect and eternal. Man may make the laws governing the strongest of nations, guide empires and kingdoms through perilous times; but how often history shows that woman's hand and woman's mind have been the controlling powers back of it all. It is the motherhood of woman to which we are indebted for all the world holds of successful effort or faithful endeavor. When Garfield, crowned with all the honors a nation could bestow, bent in reverent salutation to the white-haired mother, he gave a kingly acknowledgment to all he owed to a Christian motherhood. John Quincy Adams, when his body was bent and his hair silvered with the weight of eighty years, was accustomed to repeat each night, with folded hands and reverent voice, that simple child's prayer, learned at his mother's knee when a little boy: “Now I lay me down to sleep.” How often, when the mist of long years of wandering and sin deepens into the shadows of old age, does the memory of mother love and mother counsel gleam athwart the darkened mind.

It is in the home life of a nation that we must look for its groundwork of principles, its stability, its religious faith. In the Bible alone do we find one religion for both man and woman; and to this fact, more than all else, is due the extent and strength of Christianity to-day, and its refining, civilizing influence wherever it obtains a foothold; and only thus can a nation grow in purity and wisdom. The onus of this rests upon the mother. “Give me,” said the Catholic priest, “all children till they are ten years old, and I will guarantee their future religion for all time.” Ought a Christian mother to say less? Women have done work in the mission fields that can scarcely be estimated; but it dwarfs into insignificance beside the work—for weal or woe—that mothers are doing in the homes of our land to-day. A pebble dropped into the boundless ocean is a small thing; but its circles widen out and on infinitely; and who can tell where the influence of one home may end?

In the early days of Massachusetts lived a woman, a vagrant and a thief. From statistical authority, that one woman's descendants number several hundred; and every one, without exception, has been either a vagabond, a thief, or a criminal. A noted missionary, walking through a rural district in England, saw an old woman, clad in homespun, knitting by the open doorway of her humble cottage. “O,” said he, “what can such people as that woman yonder realize of the cry that goes up from benighted heathen lands, and the need of consecrated sacrifice and self-denial?” “Take off your hat,” was his companion's reply, “you stand in the presence of royalty itself. Yonder woman, humble and poor, by a life of unceasing toil educated her three sons; and only a few days ago, with tear-dimmed eyes but unfaltering faith, she saw the last one of the three sail away to far-off mission fields, and returned to her poor home to earn her daily bread in humble labor, knowing that in this world she will never again look upon the faces of her children. She has given her all for the Master's work.”

Out over the vast assembly, down through the hushed, expectant silence, rang a wonderful voice in the words of the song, “Where is my wandering boy?” O, the pathos, the heartbreak, the yearning in that voice! And yet my tears were more for the boy—homeless, misguided, and unrepentant—than for the mother. And why? If you, dear mothers, unite to yourselves a congenial company around the card table in your own house, you can but expect that your boy will go where he finds congenial company for his game of cards, too. If you serve wine in dainty fashion to your guests, you can scarcely condemn the rumseller, when he entices your son with brilliant lights and gay surroundings. If you clasp hands across the threshold of home with the tainted and impure, you need not be surprised if the smirch of contact rests upon your innocent daughters. Not that you should hold yourselves aloof in the spirit of the Pharisee; but while stooping with Christlike touch to comfort and win the debased and erring, you can surely find a more fitting place than within the home shelter.

It has been given to woman to reach greater depth and sublimer height than man; for not only came—and still comes—the curse of sin unto death, but also of her was the Christ-child, the Redeemer, born, and there is healing in her touch. Can either influence be measured or limited by earth's narrow bound?

O mothers, the way is so hard and strange to little feet, and dangers lurk not only in the darkening wood, but in the sunny, blossoming glades! Let each day bind about you and your little ones gossamer threads that shall grow into a cable, anchoring your life-bark in the still waters and havens of heavenly peace. But there are mothers who sit in darkness, and whose lives are one long prayer that the Good Shepherd may

bring back the wanderers into the fold. The sins of the fathers are still visited upon the innocent children, and the taint of inherited passion and appetite poisons the life of mother and child. And yet I cannot but think that in the “great day” when the records of earth are unfolded, a Christian mother's prayers will weigh heavily in the balance, when the pitying, merciful Father asks of parents the souls of little ones intrusted to their care.