The Sunday Eight O'Clock/Mother
I HEARD a man say once that he did not want to send his grown son away from home because the boy's going would separate him, he felt, from his mother's influence. It was a foolish thought. There is nothing in time or in distance that can separate one from such an influence. You can feel it today with ten thousand miles or twenty years intervening as strongly as you did when as a child you lay with your head against her breast and felt her gentle hand upon your hair. You can hear her voice and see her face as if she were now in the room with you.
"I lost my mother forty years ago," an old man said to me recently, "and yet I have never ceased to feel a daily sense of loneliness and loss." And so many of us feel.
And yet no matter how long she has been gone or how far away she is, you know very well what she would say if she were with you today, and what she would have you do. She wants you first of all to be good—to be clean and honest and strong and self-controlled. She wants you to do the day's work manfully and well without whimpering and without complaint. She may never have said these things to you in so many words, but you know without the words' having been spoken.
If through your endeavor there should come to you honor or recognition, her heart will thrill with joy to you inconceivable; if unhappily you should encounter defeat or disgrace, the pain which she will suffer you will never quite understand. Her love and her faith will follow you through every diversity of experience, and no matter who deceive or turn against you, she can be counted on.
"My boy is a good boy," mothers say to me often in the innocence of their trust. "I know he hasn't a single bad habit."
I am not surprised that most college men turn out well for, for so many years, I have seen what faith and confidence their mothers have in them and what hope is built upon their future. He would be craven indeed who lived down to a lower level than she set for him.