[Illustration:  Fig. 113]

“Mothers, the nursery of your home is like the nursery where the fruit experts do their wonderful work.  God has placed in your keeping these little ones.  You are the expert whose business it is to see that as they grow older they will not bear the small, sour fruit of wrong living, but the large, sweet fruit of Christian service.  What they are to be depends upon you.  The plum tree in the woods could not grow better of itself. It had to have help. And yet, we find mothers everywhere who seem to think that the child can develop into a high type of manhood and womanhood if he is provided with a plenty to eat and wear and with the public school and the Sunday school at his disposal.

“Within the heart of each mother God has implanted a natural knowledge of how to care for the child.  To fail to apply this knowledge is to fail to reach up to a parent’s highest privilege.

“The Sunday school can do much, but we must remember that home was God’s first and holiest school.  It is in the home that the child receives his first and most lasting lessons.  Let us not misjudge the ability of the child to perceive the inconsistency, the insincerity, of father and mother.  Even though the parent be a teacher in the Sunday school, her influence cannot be for the best if her everyday life is wasted in society and unworthy amusements.  The father’s praise of the Bible loses its gilt edge when the boy sees him bound up in the Sunday paper for two hours, without ever finding time to read the Scriptures.

“Let us all, therefore, look at this whole matter seriously.  We may each have a part in this training, this cultivating, this producing of better minds, better hands and cleaner lives, but after all, mothers, the great responsibility is yours, for it is into your hands that God has placed the children, these innocent little ones who are a type of heaven itself.”

THE HOLLOW TREE
    —­Decision Day
    —­Honesty

A Figure of the Deceitful Life—­The True Test of Character.

THE LESSON—­That stability or weakness of character are revealed when the supreme test comes.

This lesson from nature is planned to impress the truth that we must be worthy “through and through” if we are to endure the test of character which comes to every life.

The Talk.

“I want every one of you to stop looking at me and to take a good look at the wood out of which the pew ahead of you is made. [If necessary, revise the following sentences to meet your immediate conditions.] You will notice that the pew is made up of a good many pieces of oak fastened together so nicely that you can hardly tell where they are joined.  And so it is with all this other furniture, and with the tables and the chairs and the bookcases in your homes and everywhere else.  A great many fine trees must be cut down every day to furnish the wood from which all the things are made.  The furniture manufacturers buy the wood in the form of heavy lumber.  The companies which sell this lumber to the furniture factories send their expert tree buyers into the forests to pick out the trees which will make the best lumber.  These tree experts go into the forests and select the trees that they want, and leave all the others standing.