From this we may infer the character of home-influence.  It is great, silent, irresistible, and permanent.  Like the calm, deep stream, it moves on in silent, but overwhelming power.  It strikes its roots deep into the human heart, and spreads its branches wide over our whole being.  Like the lily that braves the tempest, and “the Alpine flower that leans its cheek on the bosom of eternal snows,” it is exerted amid the wildest storms of life, and breathes a softening spell in our bosom even when a heartless world is freezing up the fountains of sympathy and love.  It is governing, restraining, attracting and traditional.  It holds the empire of the heart, and rules the life.  It restrains the wayward passions of the child, and checks him in his mad career of ruin.

  “Hold the little hands in prayer, teach the weak knees their kneeling,
  Let him see thee speaking to thy God; he will not forget it afterward;
  When old and gray, will he feelingly remember a mother’s tender piety,
  And the touching recollection of her prayers shall arrest the strong
    man in his sin!”

Home-influence is traditional.  It passes down the current of life from one generation to another.  Its continuity is preserved from first to last.  The homes of our forefathers rule us even now, and will pass from us to our children’s children.  Hence it has been called the “fixed capital” of home.  It keeps up a continuous stream of home-life and feeling and interest.  Hence the family likeness, moral as well as physical,—­the family virtues and vices,—­coming from the family root and rising into all the branches, and developing in all the elements of the family history.

Home-influence is attractive.  It draws us to home, and throws a spell around our existence, which we have not the power to break.

  “The holy prayer from my thoughts hath pass’d,
  The prayer at my mother’s knee—­
  Darken’d and troubled I come at last,
  Thou home of my boyish glee!”

Home-influence may he estimated from the immense force of first impressions.  It is the prerogative of home to make the first impression upon our nature, and to give that nature its first direction onward and upward.  It uncovers the moral fountain, chooses its channel, and gives the stream its first impulse.  It makes the “first stamp and sets the first seal” upon the plastic nature of the child.  It gives the first tone to our desires, and furnishes ingredients that will either sweeten or embitter the whole cup of life.  These impressions are indelible, and durable as life.  Compared with them, other impressions are like those made upon sand or wax.  These are like “the deep borings into the flinty rock.”  To erase them we must remove every strata of our being.  Even the infidel lives under the holy influence of a pious mother’s impressions.  John Randolph could never shake off the restraining influence of a little prayer his mother taught him when a child.  It preserved him from the clutches of avowed infidelity.