p. 30 | Mothers, Take Warning

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 27, 1865

Mothers, Take Warning.

A Christian minister, calling at the house of one of his friends, found him and his wife in the deepest distress from the sudden death of their only child. He attempted to console the distracted parents; but the mother replied, "Ah, sir, these consolations might assuage my grief for the loss of my child, but they cannot blunt the stings of my conscience, which are as daggers in my heart. It was but last week, I was thinking, 'My child is now twelve years of age; his mind is rapidly expanding; I know he feels and thinks beyond the measure of his years, and a foolish backwardness has hitherto kept me from entering so closely into conversation with him as to discover the real state of his mind, and from making a vigorous effort to lead his heart to God.'"

"I then resolved to seize the first opportunity to discharge a duty so weighty on the conscience of a Christian parent; but day after day my foolish, deceitful heart said, 'I will do it to-morrow.' On the very day he was taken ill, I had resolved to talk with him that evening; and when he at first complained of his head, I was half pleased with the thought that it might incline him to listen more seriously to what I should say. But oh, sir, his pain and fever increased so rapidly that I was obliged to put him immediately to bed; and as he seemed inclined to doze, I was glad to leave him to rest. From that time he was never sufficiently sensible for conversation; and now he has gone into eternity, and has left me distracted with anxiety concerning the salvation of his precious soul.

"Dilatory wretch! had it not been for my own sin, I might now have been consoling myself with the satisfactory conviction of having discharged the duty of a Christian parent, and have been enjoying the delightful assurance of meeting my child before the throne of God and the Lamb. Oh, the cursed sin of procrastination. Oh, the ruinous delusion that lurks in the word to-morrow!"

Mothers, remember the duty which you owe to the souls of your children. Often remember them before the throne of grace. Restrain not the religious training which is needful for them—which is needful to prepare them for Heaven. "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it." Mothers, take warning!