Treatment of Parents
[Delivered in Brooklyn, N. Y., March 16, “A foolish son is the heaviness of his mother.’’ Prov. x, i.
PARENTAL SOLICITUDE.
LL parents want their children to turn out wv /I. However poorly father and mother may have done themselves, they want their sons and daughters to do splendidly. Up to forty years of age, parents may have ambitions for themselves, after that their chief ambitions, are for their children. Some of the old time names indicate this. The name of Abner means ‘’his father s lamp.” The name Abigail means ‘’her father’s joy.’’ And what a parental delight was Solomon to David, and Samuel to Hannah, and Joseph
(270) to Jacob! And the best earthly stafl’ that a father has to lean on is a good son, and the strongest arm a mother has to help her down the steep of years, is that of a grateful child. But it is not a rare thing to find people filial, and often the parents are themselves to blame. Aged persons sometimes become querulous and snappy, and the children have their hands full with the old folks.
Before entering my profession I was for three months what is called a colporteur. One day in the country districts I stopped at the house of a good, intelligent, genial farmer. The hospitality of such a country house is especially pleasing to me, for I was born in the country. This farmer and his wife were hardworking people, but tried to make their home agreeable and attractive. The farmers father, about sixty -five years of age, and his grandfather, about ninety, were yet alive and with him. Indeed, there were four generations in the house, for the farmer had little children playing about the room. We gathered at the dining table. After the blessing was asked, the farmer put some of the meat upon his plate, and courteously passed it to me, when his father of sixty-five years of age, cried out to his son, who was at least thirty years of age: ‘Why do you not pass the meat as you always do, and let us take it off the plate ourselves? You are trdng to show oft’ because we have company.’* Meanwhile his grandfather of ninety sat with his hat on at the table, his face unclean, and his apparel untidy. Still, the farmer kept his patience and equipoise, and I never think of him without admiration. He must have had more grace than I ever had.
Because people are old they have no right to be either ungentlemanly or uncanny. There are old peopk 60 talmage’s sermons.
disagreeable that they have nearly broken up some homes. The young married man with whom the aged one lives stands it because he has been used to it all his life, but the young wife, coming in from another household, can hardly endure it, and sometimes almost cries her eyes out. And when little children gather in the house, they are afraid of the venerable patriarch, who has forgotten that he ever was a child himself, and cannot understand why children should ever want to play “hide and seek,^’ or roll hoop, or fly kite, and he becomes impatient at the sound from the nursery, and shouts with an expenditure of voice that keeps him coughing fifteen minutes afterwards, “Boys! stop that racket!” as though any boy that ever amounted to anything in the world, did not begin life by making a racket!
Indeed, there are children who owe nothing to their parents, for those parents have been profligates. My lamented friend, good and Christian and lovely Henry Wilson, Vice President of the United States, in early life changed his name. He dropped his father’s name because that father was a drunkard and a disgrace, and the boy did not feel called upon to carry such a carcass all his life. While children must always be dutiful, I sympathize with all young people who have disagreeable or unprincipled old folks around the house. Some of us, drawing out of our memories, know that it is possible, after sixty, or seventy, or eighty, or ninety years of age, for the old to be kind and genial, and the grandest adornment of a home is an aged father and an aged mother, if the process of years has mellowed them.
Besides that, if your old parents are hard to ;gct along with now, you must remember there was a time when they had hard work to get along with you. When you -wre about ftye, or even, or ten, ortwdve yars pf ag”e, what a time they had with you! If they had kept a written account of your early pranks and misdoings, it would make a whole volume. That time when you gave your little sister a clip; that time when you explored the depth of ajar of sweet things, for which you had no permission; that havoc you one day made with your jack-knife; that plucking from the orchard of unripe fruit; that day when, instead of being at school, as jour parents supposed, you went a-fishing; and many a time did you imperil your young life in places where you had no business to climb, or swim, or venture. To get you through your first fifteen years with your life, and your good morals, was a fearful draft on parental fidelity and endurance.
Indeed, it may be that much of this present physical and mental weakness in your parents may have been a result of your early waywardness. You made such large and sudden drafts upon the bank of their patience, that you broke the bank. They were injured in being thrown while trying to break the colt. It is a matter of only common honesty that you pay back to them some of the long suffering which they paid’ to you. A father said to his son: Surely no father ever had as bad a boy as I have.^* Yes,’’ said the son, “my grandfather had.” It is about the same from generation to generation and parents need to be patient with children, and children dutiful to their parents. Taking it for granted that those who hear me to-da have had a good parentage, I want to urge upon all the young the fact that the happiness and longevity of parents much depend upon the right behavior of their children, and I can do this no more effectually than b” demonstrating the truth of my text, ‘*A foolish son is th? heaviness of his mother,” talmagk’s sermons.
Perhaps some young man astray may be brought back by a thought of how they feel about him at home. A French soldier lay wounded and dying in the hospital at Geneva, Switzerland. His father, at home, 70 years of age, heard of his son’s suffering, and started, and took the long journey, and found the hospital; and as he entered the son cried: O, father, I am so glad you have come to see me die.’’ No,” said the father, “you are not going to die; your mother is waiting for you, and I am going to take you home; I have brought you money and everything you need.” “No,” said the soldier, ‘Hhey,, give me here everything that is nice to eat, but I have no appetite, and I must die.” Then the father took front his knapsack a loaf of rye bread, such as the plain people of this country ate, and said, Here is a loaf of bread your mother made, and I am sure you can eat this; she sent it to you.” Then the soldier brightened up and took the bread and ate it, and said: “It is so good, the bread from home, the bread that my mother made!” No wonder that in a few days he recovered. O, young man, wounded in the battle of life, and discouraged, given up by yourself, and given up by others, the old folks at the country fireside have not given you up. I bring you bread from home. It may be plain bread, but it is that bread of which if a man eat he never again shall hunger. Bread from home! Bread from home!
Carrying out the idea of my text, I remark that a reckless or dissipated son makes a heavy-hearted parent because it hurts the family pride. It is not the given name, or the name which you received at the christening, thaA is injured by prodigality. You cannot hurt your name of John, or George, or Henry, or Mary, or Frances, or Rachel, because there have been thousands of pec?ple, good and bad, hiring thos names, nd you cannot improve or depreciate the respectability of those given names. But it Is your last name, your family name, that is at your mercy. All who bear that name are bound, before God and man, not to damage its happy significance. You are charged, by all the generations of the past and all the generations to come, to do your share for the protection, and the honor, and the integrity of that name. You have no right, my young friend, by a bad life, to blot the old family Bible containing the story of marriages and births and deaths of the years gone by, or to cast a blot upon the family Bibles whose records are yet to be opened.
There are in our American city directories names that always suggest commercial dishonesty, or libertinism,, or cruelty, or meanness,just because one man or woman bearing that name cursed it forever by miscreancy. Look out how you stab the family name! It is especially dear to your mother. She was not born under that name, but the years passed on and she came to young womanhood, and she saw some one with whom she could trust her happiness, her life and her immortal destiny; and she took his name, took it while the orange blossoms were filling the air with fragrance, took it with joined hands, took it while the heavens witnessed. She chose it out of all the family names since the world stood, chose it for better or worse, through sickness and health, by cradles and by graves.
Yea, she put off her old family name to take the family name you now bear, and she has done her part to make it an honorable name. How heavy a trouble you put upon her when, by misdeeds, you wrench that name from its high significance! To haul it down from your mother’s forehead and trample it in the dust would be criminal. Your father’s name may not be a distinguished
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name, but I hope it stands for something good. It may be famous, like that of Homer, the father of epic poetry, or Isaak Walton, the father of angling, or ^schylus, the father of tragedy, or Ethelwold, the father of monks, or Herodotus, the father of history, or Thomas Aquinas, the father of moral philosophy, or Abraham, the father of the faithful, but your father has a name in a small circle, as precious to him as theirs in a larger circle. Look out how you tarnish it.
Further, the recklessness and dissipation of a young man are a cause of parental distress at a time when the parent is less able to bear it. The vicissitudes of life have left their impression upon those parents. The eye is not as clear as once, nor the hearing as acute, nor the nerves as steady, nor the step as strong, and with the tide of incoming years comes the weight of unfilial behavior. You take your parents at a great disadvantage, for they cannot stand as much as they once could. They have not the elasticity of feeling with which they once could throw off trouble. That shoulder, now somewhat bent, cannot bear as heavy a burden as once it could. At the time when the machinery is worn out you put upon it the most terrific strain.
At sixty and seventy years the vitality is not as strong as at thirty or forty. Surely they are descending the down grade of life swiftly enough without your increasing the momentum. They will be gone soon enough without your pushing them away. Call in all the doctors who ever lived since Hippocrates raised medicine from a superstition to a science, and they could not cure the heartbreak of a mother over her ruined boy. There may be, as some suppose, enough herbs on earth, if discovered, to cure all the ailments of the body, but nothing save a leaf from the trees of the heavenly paradise can cure a wound made by a foolish son who is the heaviness of his mother.
Perhaps it is a good thing that cruel treatment by a child abbreviates a parent’s life, for what is there desirable in a father’s life or a mother’s life if its peace is gone? Do you not think death is something beneficent if it stops the mother’s heart from aching and her eyes from weeping, arid says: “You need not bear the excruciation any longer. Go and sleep. I will put the defense of a marble slab between you and that boy’s outrages. Go now where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest!” At the departure of such mothers let the music be an anthem instead of a dirge. While you and I hear no sound, yet there are at this moment tens of thousands of parental hearts breaking. All care was taken with the boy’s schooling, all good cousels given, and the equipment for a sober, earnest and useful life was provided, but it has all gone, and the foolish son has become the heaviness of his mother.
Much of the poignancy of the parental grief arises from the ingratitude of such behavior. What an undertaking it is to conduct a family through the ailments and exposures of early life! Talk about the skill demanded of a sea captain commanding a ship across the ocean! That requires less skill than to navigate a young soul in safety across the infantile and bo^hood years. The sickness that assault, the temptations that entrap, the anxieties that are excited! Young men you will never know what your mother has suffered for you. You will never know how your father has toiled for you. You have been in all their thoughts, in all their plans, in all their prayers, from the time your first breath was drawn to this moment’s
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respiration. What the could do for your health, what they could do for your happiness, what they could do for your mind, what they could do for your soul, have been absorbing questions. To earn a livelihood for you has not always been an easy thing for your father. By what fatigues of body and what disturbances of mind, and long years of struggle, in which sometimes the losses were greater than the gains, he got bread for you, paying for it in the sweat of his own brow and the red drops of his own hearths blood! He looks older than he ought to look at his years, for it has been work, work, work. Many a time he felt like giving up the battle, but then he looked at your helplessness, and the helplessness of the household, and then he nerved himself up anew and said: *^By the help of God I will not stop; my children must have a home and education and advantages, and a comfortable starting in the world, and I must get a little something ahead, so that if I am taken away these helpless ones will not be turned out on the cold charities of the world.’’ Yes, your father has been a good friend to you. He has never told any one, and he never will tell any one, of the sacrifices he has made for you. And he is ready to keep right on until that hand that has been toiling for you all these years shall come the very numbness of death. You cannot afford to break his heart. But you are doing it. Yes, you are. You have driven the dagger clear in up to the hilt.
And your mother — I warrant she has never told you much about the night when you were down with scarlet fever, or diphtheria, and she slept not a wink, or, falling into drowisness, your first cry awakened her, and brought the words, What is it, my dear?’’ Oh, if the old rocking chair could speak! Oh, if the cradle could o
ft in o only tell its story of years! And when you got better, and were fretful and hard to please, as is usual in convalescence, she kept her patience so well, and was as kind as you were unreasonable. Oh, midnight of motherly watching, how can you keep silent? Speak out and tell that wandering young man the story that he so much needs to hear.
WHAT HAS BECOME OF THE OLD CRADLE?
By the bye, I wonder what has become of our old cradle in which all of us children were rocked! I must ask my sister when I see her next time. We were a large family and that old cradle was going a good many years. I remember just how it looked. It was old-fashioned and had no tapestry. Its two sides and canopy all of plain wood, but there was a great deal of sound sleeping in thatradle, and many aches and pains were soothed by it as it moved to and fro by day and night. Most vividly I remember that the rockers which came out from under the cradle were on the top and side very smooth, so smooth that they actually glistened. They must have been worn smooth by a foot that long ago ceased its journey. How tired the foot that pressed it must sometimes have got! But it did not stop for that. It went right on and rocked for Phebe the first and for De Witt the last. And it was a cradle like that, or perhaps of modern make and richly upholstered, in which your mother rocked you. Can it be that for all that care and devotion you are paying her back with harsh words, or neglect, or a wicked life? Then I must tell you that you are the foolish son who is the heaviness of his mother.’’ Better go home and kiss her, and ask her forgiveness. Kiss her on the lips that have so often prayed for you. Kiss her on the forehead that so
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often ached for yon. Kiss her in the eyes that have so often wept over you. Better go right away, for she will be dead before long. And how will you feel then after you realize it is your waywardness that killed her? Romulus made no law against patricide, or the slaying of a father; matricide, or the slaying of a mother, be cause he considered such crimes impossible, and for six hundred years there was not a crime of that sort in Rome. But then came Lucius Ostus and slew his father, proving the crime possible. Now do you not think that the <!hild who by wrong behavior sends his father to a premature grave is a patricide, or who by misconduct hastens a mother into a tomb is a matricide?
The heaviness of parents over a son’s depravity is all the greater because it means spiritual disaster and overthrow. That is the worst thing about it. In the pension regulations a soldier receives for loss of both hands and feet $72. For loss of one hand and one foot $36. For loss of a hand or foot $30. For loss of both eyes $72. But who can calculate the value of a whole man ruined body, mind and soul? How can parents have any happiness about your future destiny, oh young man gone astray? Can such opposite lives as you and they are living come out at the same place? Can holiness and dissipation enter the same gate? Where is the little prayer that was taught you at your mother’s knee? Is the God they loved and worshiped your God? It is your soul about which they are most anxious, your roul that shall live after the earth itself shall be girdled with flames, and the flames, dying down, willleavethe planet only a live coal, and the live coal shall have become ashes, and then the ashes shall be scattered by the whirlwinds of the Almighty.
’ But, says some young man, ^’my mother is gone; my behavior now will not trouble her any more at all.” Oh that those lips had language. Life has passed With me but roughly since I heard thee last. What! Is she dead? How you startle me! Is she dead! Then perhaps you have her picture. Hang it up in your room in the place where you oftenest look. Go and study her features, and while you are looking the past will come back, and you ma’^ hear her voice, which is now so still, speak again, saying: From my heavenly home, my dear boy, I solicit your reformation and salvation. Go to the Christ who pardoned me, and He will pardon you. My heaven will not be complete till I hear of your changing. But I will hear of it right a way for there is joy up here when one sinner repenteth; and oh, that the next news of that kind that comes tip here, might come up regarding you, oh my child of many tears and anxieties and prayers?’^
Come, my boy, do you not hear your mother’s voice? O my son, my son, would God that I could die for thee! O my son, my son! Young man, what news for heaven would be your conversion. Swifter than telegraphic wire ever carried congratulations to a wedding or a coronation would fly heavenward the news of your deliverance; and whether the one most interested in your salvation were on river bank, or in the temple, or on the battlements, or in the great tower, the message would be instantly received, and before this service is closed angel would cry to angel: Have you heard the news? Out yonder is a mother who has just heard of her wayward boys redemption. Another prodigal has got home. The dead is alive again, and the lost is found. Hallelujah! Amen!’’