The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis by Ellice Hopkins
page 56 of 191 (29%)
page 56 of 191 (29%)
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'shall.'"[10]
The second great pillar of the portal of noble life seems to me to show still greater signs of being out of repair and in want of restoration, and that pillar is reverence,--that heaven-eyed quality which Dr. Martineau rightly places at the very top of the ethical scale. Let that crumble, and the character which might have been a temple sinks into a mere counting-house. When in these days children are allowed to call their father Dick, Jack, or Tom, and nickname their own mother; when they are allowed to drown the voice of the most honored guest at the table with their little bald chatter, so that even the cross-questioning genius of a Socrates would find itself at a discount; when they are allowed to criticise and contradict their elders in a way that would have appalled our grandmothers; when they are suffered to make remarks which are anything but reverent on sacred things--have I not some reason to fear that the one attribute which touches the character to fine issues is threatened with extinction? Do you think that the boy who has never been taught to reverence his own mother's womanhood will reverence the degraded womanhood of our streets, or hear that Divine Voice guarding all suffering manhood and all helpless womanhood from wrong at his hands, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these, ye have done it unto Me?" Oh, I would entreat you to set yourself firmly against this evil tendency of our day, to which I cannot but believe so much of its agnosticism is due,--that deadening down and stamping out of the spiritual instincts of our nature, those great intuitions of the soul, which lie both above and below all reasoning and logic and form their basis rather than their apex. Once let the springs of reverence be choked up, once let that window of the soul be overgrown with weeds and |
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