More and more as we grow, we appreciate the finer traits of human nature. Men going out into life never forget the mother who stays at home, and who has presented to them a nature with reason dominant, with a high moral sense, with refined and sweet affections, with taste, with patience, with gentleness, with self-sacrifice, and with disinterestedness.
A man may go through all the world; he may become a pirate, if you please; he may run through every stage of belief and unbelief; he may become absolutely apostate; he may rub out his conscience; he may destroy his fineness in every respect; but there will be one picture which he cannot efface. Living or dying there will rise before him, like a morning star, the beauty of that remembered goodness which he called mother.
There are men who are so cynical that they swear the whole race to hell; but they always spare some one person— wife, or sister, or mother. There is a single character that survives annihilation in their thoughts. There is nothing that takes hold of a man’s very being so much as a nature that seems to be well nigh perfect.—BEECHER.