THE HOME.

White Ribbon, Volume 3, Issue 34, 1 April 1898, Page 11

THE HOME.

A TALK TO MOTHERS. “ Ah, if I had known in time, if my mother had only told me,” is the heartbroken cry of many a young life ruined from want of knowledge of a subject which has the most vital connection with happiness or woe. Think, mothers, how careful we are that our children shall have a good education, and how proud we are of their scholastic success. But, alas for our darlings, how often do we imagine that education stops at scholastic attainments. How often are our children launched on the rude waves of life’s sea with never a word in explanation of the wondrous meaning of sex. How

often is the very idea of the need o! such an explanation scouted, and any suggestion avoided that would lead naturally to it. From earliest childhood the question naturally and rightly arises, “ W hence came I ? ” and the query is met lightly, thoughtlessly, cruelly, with a lie in reponse. The subtle poison begins its deadly work ; here is the first lesson in deceit. No thoughtful child believes the story of the cabbage or the stork origin. Other questions bearing on the same subject are evaded or again answered with a lie, and the child begins to understand that there is some fearsome mystery surrounding the subject of his enquiry. The light laugh, the prompt repression, are causes which have the most lamentable and farreaching effects, bearing their train of woe adown the centuries. Oh, mothers ! it i: time to forbear this lying and betake ourselves to truth. And yet this simple duty seems hard to most of us, so terribly akin, from the perversion of our thought, seems sex and sin. But are we not all asking “ Whence ha\e we come, and whither are we tending?” Our little child but echoes the question of the sages of all the ages, and proud we should be that we can at least reveal some of the secret it seeks to know If we could begin by explaining we of this materialistic nineteenth century that our bodies are habitations,—temples, as St. Faul so beautifully terms them, —of the Holy Spirit; that they are given us in order that this glorious Spirit, which comes from God, and whose marvellous beauties we can scarcely begin to realise may shine through them, we shall have got over a great deal of the seeming difficulty. Then it will be easy to say, further, that so marvellously does the great All-Spirit build

that the grand old oak, the dear, Huffy little chick, and the tiny babe, all begin life from one wonderful little cell, and at that beginning the one which grew to be the oak, and tile other that became the chick could hardly have been distinguished from the one that became the baby's body. Here, see, the bean, the nest of the baby bean plant: how like a tiny egg it lies snugly wrapped in the softest covering. It is the offspring of the flower, the fairest thing the bean plant could show. When the time comes for it to set about its life-work, as we know it, the soft cradle opens and it sinks into the ground—a little childbean. So the babe from this tiny cell grows and grows under its mother’s heart, encircled round with the softest, loveliest wrappings until the time has come for it to set about its life's work too, and then it comes into the light of day, and changes its snug, warm nest for its mothe*’s welcoming arms. Surely some such communings with our little ones would gain their confidence, and as the years roll by the needs that come with them would be more easily responded to, and life for our loved ones made, oh ! how much more, easy.