Fashionable Mothers

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Apr 3, 1879

Fashionable Mothers.

FASHIONABLE mothers, what are you doing to make the world better or happier— to elevate, purify, and sanctify? How are you training your sons and daughters? On gospel principles, to habits of industry, economy, purity, and sobriety; and is your influence for good or evil; on the side of virtue or of vice?

Who ever knew a great and good man, or great and good women, reared under the tuition of a fashionable mother? Whence came our Moseses, Miriams, Samuels, John the Baptists, our Timothys, Wesleys, Doddridges, the John Newtons, the Washingtons—whence are they—who trained them, moulded their infantile years--fashionable mothers? Not one! These great, good, holy, and eminently useful men had great and good mothers—plain, practical, industrious, economical, diligent in business, prayerful, God-fearing.—See Prov. 31:10-31.

Read the biographies of all our great and good men and women, from early time to the present—not one of them had a fashionable mother. They all sprang from plain, strong-minded women, who had as little to do with fashion as with the changing clouds. Away, then, with your starch, your aristocracy, your gewgaws, your pride, and your folly. Live for something—live for God and glory.

A pious mother, then, is the greatest of all earthly blessings. The influence she exerts is the most excellent known on earth. Children brought up by a godly mother--who knows her duty and does it—who doubts their salvation? She makes the earliest, the deepest, and the most lasting impressions on their hearts. In their minds, religion is associated with all that is kind, winning, and pleasant in home-life. They grow up with reverence for the Bible, the Sabbath, the house of God, and the ministers of Christ. They cannot remember the first time they heard the name of Jesus, or bowed their knees in prayer, or lisped the praises of God. They are instructed to hate and shun vice, and the seductions to it, and to admire and practice virtue. Having been trained up in the way that they should go, when they are old they will not depart from it.

How great is their responsibility! God has committed to them the salvation of their own offspring. To secure the faithful discharge of the trust, he has planted in the maternal heart an affection which no toil, care, or sacrifice can exhaust. No mother, who studies her responsibility or the interests of her children, can consent to be without the sustaining and guiding influence of divine grace.

Fashion kills more women than toil and sorrow. Obedience to fashion is a greater transgression of the law of woman's nature, a greater injury to her physical constitution, than the hardships of poverty and neglect. The slave woman at her task will live and grow old, and see two or three generations of her mistresses fade and pass away. The washerwoman, with scarcely a ray of hope to cheer her in her toils, will live to see her fashionable sisters all die around her. It is a sad truth that the fashion-pampered women are almost worthless for the great ends of human life. They have but little force of character, they have still less of moral will, and quite as little physical energy.