MOTHER! | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Sep 22, 1881

“MOTHER!”

IN one of the most honored and influential families of Virginia, a wife and mother died in the bloom of her womanly beauty.

For several years she had been a gentle, unobtrusive, yet faithful Christian woman. When she felt that the last moments of life were approaching, she called her little children to her bedside, and kissed them, and talked of leaving them, and of the happy world where she expected finally to be.

The eldest was but six years of age, but he could understand her when she laid her hand upon his head and charged him to love and serve his mother’s God and Saviour.

The boy grew to manhood. No effect of that death-bed scene and lesson appeared in his life. Forty years passed without a sign that he ever thought of his mother’s last words and benediction.

He was a generous-hearted, popular gentleman, with a fine home, where he welcomed friends with a lavish hospitality. No beggar went away hungry from his door.

But his most admired virtues showed no divine principle, or trace of religious feeling. Beyond a certain pride of position and superiority, he seemed to acknowledge no restraint. He was self-indulgent and impetuous, profane on the slightest provocation, and like most men of his class, devoted to horse-racing and the pleasures of the chase.

Suddenly a change came. He was the same courteous, hospitable gentleman, but he broke away abruptly from his convivial habits. His manner was more thoughtful and quiet, and he was seen regularly at divine worship on Sabbath.

In no long time he openly declared himself one of the lowly number who call Jesus Master and Lord.

The change itself was no more surprising than his account of it. It was no sermon or spoken or written word that had turned him from his worldly course, but it was the touch of his mother’s hand. More than forty years before she had laid it on his head in blessing—and he declared that he had felt it ever since.

Amid all the cares of his great estate, in his noisiest gaiety, in the excitements of the race-course, in the fury of political strife, the pressure of that soft hand, he said, perpetually recalled his mother and her dying charge. And the time came when he could resist its appeals no longer.

Such a parting token has a voice that will not be silent, and a power that will not die.