In this respect how irresistible is the influence of a mother’s love and kindness!  Her very name awakens the torpid streams of life, gives a fresh glow to the tablets of memory, and fills our hearts with a deep gush of consecrated feeling.

Our habits, too, are formed under the moulding power of home.  The “tender twig” is there bent, the spirit shaped, principles implanted, and the whole character is formed until it becomes a habit.  Goodness or evil are there “resolved into necessity.”  Who does not feel this influence of home upon all his habits of life?  The gray-haired father who wails in his second infancy, feels the traces of his childhood-home in his spirit, desires and habits.  Ask the strong man in the prime of life, whether the most firm and reliable principles of his character were not the inheritance of the parental home.  What an influence the teaching’s and prayers of his mother Monica had upon the whole character of the pious Augustine!  The sterling worth of Washington is a testimony to the formative power of parental instruction.  John Quincy Adams, even when his eloquence thundered through our legislative halls, and caused a nation to startle from her slumber, bent his aged form before God, and repeated the prayer of his childhood.  “How often in old age,” says Bishop Hall, “have I valued those divine passages of experimental divinity that I heard from the lips of a mother!” Dr. Doddridge ever lived under the influence of those scripture instructions his mother gave him from the Dutch tiles of her fireside.  He says, “these lessons were the instruments of my conversion.”  “Generally,” says Dr. Cumming, “when, there is a Sarah in the house, there will be an Isaac in the cradle; wherever there is a Eunice teaching a Timothy the scriptures from a child, there will be a Timothy teaching the gospel to the rest of mankind.”  By the force of this same influence, the pious wife may win over to Christ her ungodly husband, and the godly child may save the unbelieving parent.  “Well,” said a mother one day weeping, “I will resist no longer!  How can I bear to see my dear child love and read the scriptures, while I never look into the bible,—­to see her retire and seek God, while I never pray,—­to see her going to the Lord’s table, while His death is nothing to me!  I know she is right, and I am wrong.  I ought to have taught her; but I am sure she has taught me.  How can I bear to see her joining the church of God, and leaving me behind—­perhaps forever!”

The Christian home has its influence also upon the state.  It forms the citizen, lays the foundation for civil and political character, prepares the social element and taste, and determines our national prosperity or adversity.  We owe to the family, therefore, what we are as a nation as well as individuals.  We trace this influence in the pulpit, on the rostrum, in the press, in our civil and political institutions.  It is written upon the scroll of our national glory.