527. The Grandmother

The Grandmother

2Ti_1:5 : ’93The unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois.’94

In this affectionate letter which Paul, the old minister, is writing to Timothy, the young minister, the family record is brought out. Paul practically says: ’93Timothy, what a good grandmother you had! You ought to be better than most folks, you had not only a good mother, but a good grandmother. Two preceding generations of piety ought to give you a mighty push in the right direction.’94 The fact was that Timothy needed encouragement. He was in poor health, having a weak stomach, and was dyspeptic, and Paul prescribed for him a tonic, ’93a little wine, for thy stomach’92s sake’94’97not much wine, but a little wine, and only as a medicine. And if the wine then had been as much adulterated with logwood and strychnine as our modern wines, he would not have prescribed any.

But Timothy, not strong physically, is encouraged spiritually by the recital of grandmotherly excellence, Paul hinting to him, as I now hint to you, that God sometimes gathers up, as in a reservoir away back of the active generations of today, a godly influence, and then in response to prayer, lets down the power upon children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The world is wofully in want of a table of statistics in regard to what is the protractedness and immensity of influence of one good woman in the church and world. We have accounts of how much evil has been wrought by Margaret, the mother of criminals, who lived nearly a hundred years ago, and of how many hundreds of criminals her descendants furnished for the penitentiary and the gallows, and how many hundreds of thousands of dollars they cost this country in their arraignment and prison support, as well as in the property they burglarized or destroyed. But will not some one with brain comprehensive enough and heart warm enough and pen keen enough come out and give us the facts in regard to some good woman of a hundred years ago, and let us know how many Christian men and women and reformers and useful people have been found among her descendants, and how many asylums and colleges and churches they built, and how many millions of dollars they contributed for humanitarian and Christian purposes? The good women whose tombstones were planted in the eighteenth century are more alive for good in the nineteenth century than they were before, as the good women of this nineteenth century will be more alive for good in the twentieth century than now. Mark you, I have no idea that the grandmothers were any better than their granddaughters. You cannot get very old people to talk much about how things were when they were boys and girls. They have a reticence and a non-committalism which makes me think they feel themselves to be the custodians of the reputation of their early comrades. While our dear old folks are rehearsing the follies of the present, if you put them on the witness-stand and cross-examine them as to how things were seventy years ago, the silence becomes oppressive.

A celebrated Frenchman by the name of Volney visited this country in 1796, and he says of woman’92s diet in those times: ’93If a premium was offered for a regimen most destructive to health, none could be devised more efficacious for these ends than that in use among these people.’94 That eclipses our lobster salad at midnight. Everybody talks about the dissipations of modern society, and how womanly health goes down under it, but it was worse a hundred years ago, for the chaplain of a French regiment in our Revolutionary War wrote in 1782, in his book of American women, saying: ’93They are tall and well-proportioned, their features are generally regular, their complexions are generally fair and without color. At twenty years of age the women have no longer the freshness of youth. At thirty or forty they are decrepit.’94 In 1812 a foreign consul wrote a book entitled, ’93A Sketch of the United States at the Commencement of the Present Century,’94 and he says of the women of those times, ’93At the age of thirty all their charms have disappeared.’94 One glance at the portraits of the women a hundred years ago and their style of dress makes us wonder how they ever got their breath. All this makes me think that the express rail-train is no more an improvement on the old canal-boat, or the telegraph no more an improvement on the old-time saddlebags, than the women of our day are an improvement on the women of the last century.

But, notwithstanding that those times were so much worse than ours, there was a glorious race of godly women seventy and a hundred years ago, who held the world back from sin and lifted it toward virtue, and without their exalted and sanctified influence the last good influence would have perished from the earth before this. Indeed, all over this land there are seated today’97not so much in churches, for many of them are too feeble to come’97a great many aged grandmothers. They sometimes feel that the world has gone past them, and they have an idea that they are of little account. Their head sometimes gets aching from the racket of the grandchildren downstairs or in the next room. They steady themselves by the banisters as they go up and down. When they get a cold, it hangs on to them longer than it used to. They cannot bear to have the grandchildren punished even when they deserve it, and have so relaxed their ideas of family discipline that they would spoil all the youngsters of the household by too great leniency. These old folks are the confidantes when great troubles come, and there is a calming and soothing power in the touch of an aged hand that is almost supernatural. They feel they are almost through with the journey of life, and read the old Book more than they used to, hardly knowing which most they enjoy, the Old Testament or the New, and often stop and dwell tearfully over the family record half way between. We hail them today, whether in the house of God or at the homestead. Blessed is that household that has in it a grandmother Lois. Where she is, angels are hovering round, and God is in the room. May her last days be like those lovely autumnal days that we call Indian Summer.

I never knew the joy of having a grandmother; that is the disadvantage of being the youngest child of the family. The elder members only have that benediction. But though she went up out of this life before I began it, I have heard of her faith in God, that brought all her children into the kingdom and two of them into the ministry, and then brought all her grandchildren into the kingdom, myself the last and least worthy. Is it not time that you and I do two things, swing open a picture-gallery of the wrinkled faces and stooped shoulders of the past, and call down from their heavenly thrones the godly grandmothers, to give them our thanks, and then persuade the mothers of today that they are living for all time, and that against the sides of every cradle in which a child is rocked beat the two eternities. Here we have an untried, undiscussed, and unexplored subject. You often hear about your influence upon your own children’97I am not talking about that. What about your influence upon the twentieth century, upon the thirtieth century, upon the fortieth century, upon the year 2000, upon the year 4000, if the world lasts so long? The world stood four thousand years before Christ came; it is not unreasonable to suppose that it may stand four thousand years after his arrival. Four thousand years the world swung off in sin; four thousand years it may be swinging back into righteousness. By the ordinary rate of multiplication of the world’92s population in a century, your descendants will be over three hundred, and by two centuries at least thirty thousand, and upon every one of them you, the mother of today, will have an influence for good or evil. And if in four centuries your descendants shall have with their names filled a scroll of hundreds of thousands, will some angel from heaven to whom is given the capacity to calculate the number of the stars of heaven and the sands of the seashore, step down and tell us how many descendants you will have in the four thousandth year of the world’92s possible continuance?

Do not let the grandmothers any longer think that they are retired, and sit clear back out of sight from the world, feeling that they have no relation to it. The mothers of the last century are today in the senates, the parliaments, the palaces, the pulpits, the banking-houses, the professional chairs, the prisons, the almshouses, the company of midnight brigands, the cellars, the ditches of this country. You have been thinking about the importance of having the right influence upon one nursery. You have been thinking about the importance of getting those two little feet on the right path. You have been thinking of your child’92s destiny for the next eighty years, if it should pass on to be an octogenarian. That is well, but my subject sweeps a thousand years, a million years, a quadrillion of years. I cannot stop at one cradle; I am looking at the cradles that reach all round the world and across all time. I am not talking of mother Eunice; I am talking of grandmother Lois.

The only way you can tell the force of a current is by sailing up-stream; or the force of an ocean wave, by running the ship against it. Running along with it we cannot appreciate the force. In estimating maternal influence we generally run along with it down the stream of time, and so we do not understand the full force. Let us come up to it from the eternity side, after it has been working on for centuries, and see all the good it has done and all the evil it has accomplished multiplied in magnificent or appalling compound interest. The difference between that mother’92s influence on her children now, and the influence when it has been multiplied in hundreds of thousands of lives, is the difference between the Mississippi river, way up at the top of the continent, starting from the little Lake Itasca, seven miles long and one wide, and its mouth at the Gulf of Mexico, where navies might ride. Between the birth of that river and its burial in the sea, the Missouri pours in, and the Ohio pours in, and the Arkansas pours in, and the Red and White and Yazoo rivers pour in, and all the States and Territories between the Alleghany and Rocky mountains make contribution. Now, in order to test the power of a mother’92s influence, we need to come in off of the ocean of eternity and sail up toward the one cradle, and we find ten thousand tributaries of influence pouring in and pouring down. But it is, after all, one great river of power rolling on and rolling forever. Who can fathom it? Who can bridge it? Who can stop it? Had not mothers better be intensifying their prayers? Had they not better be elevating by their example? Had they not better be rousing themselves with the consideration that by their faithfulness or neglect they are starting an influence which will be stupendous after the last mountain of earth is flat, and the last sea has been dried up, and the last flake of the ashes of a consumed world shall have been blown away, and all the telescopes of other worlds, directed to the track around which our world once swung, shall discover not so much as a cinder of the burned-down and swept-off planet. In Ceylon there is a granite column thirty-six feet square in size, which is thought, by the natives, to decide the world’92s continuance. An angel with robe spun from zephyrs is once a century to descend and sweep the hem of that robe across the granite, and when, by that attrition the column is worn away, they say time will end. But, by that process, that granite column would be worn out of existence before a mother’92s influence will begin to give way.

If a mother tell a child that if he is not good, some bugaboo will come and catch him, the fear excited may make the child a coward, and the fact that he finds that there is no bugaboo may make him a liar, and the echo of that false alarm may be heard after fifteen generations have been born and have expired. If a mother promise a child a reward for good behavior, and after the good behavior forgets to give the reward, the cheat may crop out in some faithlessness half a thousand years further on. If a mother cultivate a child’92s vanity, and eulogize his curls, and extol the night-black or sky-blue or nut-brown of the child’92s eyes, and call out in his presence the admiration of spectators, pride and arrogance may be prolonged after half a dozen family records have been obliterated. If a mother express doubt about some statement of the Holy Bible in a child’92s presence, long after the gates of this historical era have closed and the gates of another era have opened, the result may be seen in a champion blasphemer. But, on the other hand, if a mother walking with a child see a suffering one by the wayside and says: ’93My child, give that ten-cent piece to that lame boy,’94 the result may be seen on the other side of the following century in some George Muller building a whole village of orphanages. If a mother sit almost every evening by the trundle-bed of a child and teach it lessons of a Saviour’92s love and a Saviour’92s example, of the importance of truth and the horror of a lie, and the virtues of industry and kindness and sympathy and self-sacrifice, long after the mother is gone, and the child has gone, and the lettering on both the tombstones shall have been washed out by the storms of innumerable winters, there may be standing, as a result of those trundle-bed lessons, flaming evangels, world-moving reformers, seraphic Summerfields, weeping Paysons, thundering White-fields, emancipating Washingtons.

Good or bad influence may skip one generation or two generations, but it will be sure to land in the third or fourth generation, just as the Ten Commandments, speaking of the visitation of God on families, says nothing about the second generation, but entirely skips the second and speaks of the third and fourth generations: ’93Visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the third and fourth generations of them that hate me.’94 Parental influence, right and wrong, may jump over a generation, but it will come down further on, as sure as you sit there and I stand here. Timothy’92s ministry was projected by his grandmother Lois. There are men and women here, the sons and daughters of the Christian church, who are such as a result of the consecration of great-great-grandmothers. Why, who do you think the Lord is? You talk as though his memory was weak. He can no easier remember a prayer five minutes than he can five centuries.

This explains what we often see’97some man or woman distinguished for benevolence when the father and mother were distinguished for penuriousness; or you see some young man or woman with a bad father and a hard mother come out gloriously for Christ, and make the church sob and shout and sing under their exhortations. We stand in corners of the vestry and whisper over the matter and say: ’93How is this, such great piety in sons and daughters of such parental worldliness and sin?’94 I will explain it to you if you will fetch me the old family Bible containing the full record. Let some septuagenarian look with me upon the pages of births and marriages, and tell me who that woman was with the old-fashioned name of Jemima or Betsy or Mehitabel. Ah, there she is, the old grandmother or great-grandmother, who had enough religion to saturate a century. There she is, the dear old soul, grandmother Lois. In beautiful Greenwood there is the resting-place of George W. Bethune, once a minister of Brooklyn Heights, his name never spoken among intelligent Americans without suggesting two things’97eloquence and evangelism. In the same tomb sleeps his grandmother, Isabella Graham, who was the chief inspiration of his ministry. You are not surprised at the poetry and pathos and pulpit power of the grandson when you read of the faith and devotion of his wonderful ancestress. When you read this grandmother’92s letter, in which she poured out her widowed soul in longings for a son’92s salvation, you will not wonder that succeeding generations have been blessed:

New York, May 20, 1791.

This day my only son left me in bitter wringings of heart; he is again launched on the ocean, God’92s ocean. The Lord saved him from shipwreck, brought him to my home and allowed me once more to indulge my affections over him. He has been with me but a short time, and ill have I improved it; he is gone from my sight, and my heart bursts with tumultuous grief. Lord, have mercy on the widow’92s son, ’93the only son of his mother.’94

I ask nothing in all this world for him; I repeat my petition’97save his soul alive, give him salvation from sin. It is not the danger of the seas that distresses me; it is not the hardships he must undergo; it is not the dread of never seeing him more in this world; it is because I cannot discern the fulfillment of the promise in him, I cannot discern the new birth nor its fruit, but every symptom of captivity to Satan, the world and self-will. This, this is what distresses me; and in connection with this, his being shut out from ordinances at a distance from Christians; shut up with those who forget God, profane his name and break his Sabbaths; men who often live and die like beasts, yet are accountable creatures, who must answer for every moment of time and every word, thought and action.

O, Lord, many wonders hast thou shown me; thy ways of dealing with me and mine have not been common ones; add this wonder to the rest. Call, convert, regenerate and establish a sailor in the faith. Lord, all things are possible with thee; glorify thy Son and extend his kingdom by sea and land; take the prey from the strong. I roll him over upon thee. Many friends try to comfort me; miserable comforters are they all. Thou art the God of consolation; only confirm to me thy precious word, on which thou causedst me to hope in the day when thou saidst to me, ’93Leave thy fatherless children, I will preserve them alive.’94 Only let this life be a spiritual life, and I put a blank in thy hand as to all temporal things.

I wait for thy salvation. Amen.

With such a grandmother would you not have a right to expect a George W. Bethune? and all the thousands converted through his ministry may date the saving power back to Isabella Graham.

God fill the earth and heavens with such grandmothers; we must some day go up and thank these dear old souls. Surely, God will let us go up and tell them of the results of their influence. Among our first questions in heaven will be, ’93Where is grandmother?’94 They will point her out, for we would hardly know her even if we had seen her on earth, so bent over with years once, and there so straight, so dim of eye through the blinding of earthly tears, and now her eye as clear as heaven, so full of aches and pains once, and now so agile with celestial health, the wrinkles blooming into carnation roses, and her step like the roe on the mountains. Yes, I must see her, my grandmother on my father’92s side, Mary McCoy, descendant of the Scotch. When I first spoke to an audience in Glasgow, Scotland, and felt somewhat diffident, being a stranger, I began by telling them that my grandmother was a Scotchwoman, and then went up a shout of welcome which made me feel as easy as I do here. I must see her. You must see these women of the early nineteenth century and of the eighteenth century, the answer of whose prayers is in your welfare today.

God bless all the aged women up and down the land and in all lands! What a happy thing, Pomponius Atticus, to say, when making the funeral address of his mother: ’93Though I have resided with her sixty-seven years, I was never once reconciled to her, because there never happened the least discord between us, and consequently, there was no need of reconciliation.’94 Make it as easy for the old folks as you can. When they are sick, get for them the best doctors. Give them your arm when the streets are slippery. Stay with them all the time you can. Go home and see the old folks. Find the place for them in the hymn-book. Never be ashamed if they prefer styles of apparel a little antiquated. Never say anything that implies that they are in the way. Make the road for the last mile as smooth as you can. How you will miss her when she is gone. I would give the house from over my head to see my mother. I have so many things I would like to tell her, things that have happened in all these years since she went away. Morning, noon and night let us thank God for the good influences that have come down from good mothers all the way back. Timothy, do not forget your mother Eunice, and do not forget your grandmother Lois. And hand down to others this patrimony of blessing. Pass along the coronets. Make religion an heirloom from generation to generation. Mothers of America, consecrate yourselves to God, and you will help consecrate all the ages following! Do not dwell so much on your hardships that you miss your chance of wielding an influence that shall look down upon you from the towers of an endless future.

This is a hard world for women. Aye, I go further and say, it is a hard world for men. But for all women and men who trust their bodies and souls in the hand of Christ, the shining gates will soon swing open. Do you not see the sickly pallor on the sky? That is the pallor on the cold cheek of the dying night. Do you not see the brightening of the clouds? That is the flush on the warm forehead of the morning. Cheer up, you are coming within sight of the Celestial City.

Cairo, capital of Egypt, was called ’93City of Victory.’94 Athens, capital of Greece, was called ’93City of the Violet Crown’94; Baalbeck was called ’93City of the Sun’94; London was called ’93The City of Masts.’94 Lucia’92s imaginary metropolis beyond the Zodiac was called ’93The City of Lanterns.’94 But the city to which you journey hath all these in one, the victory, the crowns, the masts of those that have been harbored after the storm. Aye, all but the lanterns and the sun, because they have no need of any other light, since the Lamb is the light thereof.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage