14.  An empty, or an evil name.—­Young and old cannot afford to bear the burden of an empty or an evil name.  A good name is a motive of life.  It is a reason for that great encampment we call an existence.  While you are building the home of to-morrow, build up also that kind of soul that can sleep sweetly on home’s pillow, and can feel that God is not near as an avenger of wrong, but as the Father not only of the verdure and the seasons, but of you.

[Illustration:  An Egyptian Dancer.]

* * * * *

The mother’s influence.

Mother, O mother, my heart calls for you, Many a Summer the grass has grown green, Blossomed and faded, our faces between; Yet with strong yearning and passionate pain, Long I to-night for your presence again. —­Elizabeth Akers Allen.

  A mother is a mother still,
  The holiest thing alive.
  —­Coleridge.

There is none, In all this cold and hollow world, no fount Of deep, strong, deathless love, save that within A mother’s heart. —­Mrs. Hemans.

  And all my mother came into mine eyes,
  And gave me up to tears.
  —­Shakespeare.

1.  Her influence.—­It is true to nature, although it be expressed in a figurative form, that a mother is both the morning and the evening star of life.  The light of her eye is always the first to rise, and often the last to set upon man’s day of trial.  She wields a power more decisive far than syllogisms in argument or courts of last appeal in authority.

2.  Her love.—­Mother! ecstatic sound so twined round our hearts that they must cease to throb ere we forget it; ’tis our first love; ’tis part of religion.  Nature has set the mother upon such a pinnacle that our infant eyes and arms are first uplifted to it; we cling to it in manhood; we almost worship it in old age.

3.  Her tenderness.—­Alas! how little do we appreciate a mother’s tenderness while living.  How heedless are we in youth of all her anxieties and kindness!  But when she is dead and gone, when the cares and coldness of the world come withering to our hearts, when we experience for ourselves how hard it is to find true sympathy, how few to love us, how few will befriend us in misfortune, then it is that we think of the mother we have lost.

4.  Her controlling power.—­The mother can take man’s whole nature under her control.  She becomes what she has been called “The Divinity of Infancy.”  Her smile is its sunshine, her word its mildest law, until sin and the world have steeled the heart.

[Illustration:  A prayerful and devoted mother.]

5.  The last tie.—­The young man who has forsaken the advice and influence of his mother has broken the last cable and severed the last tie that binds him to an honorable and upright life.  He has forsaken his best friend, and every hope for his future welfare may be abandoned, for he is lost forever, if he is faithless to mother, he will have but little respect for wife and children.