Take the history of Rehaboam. There is, in his life, just one short sentence which supplies the key, more perhaps than anything else, to his sin and folly,—“his mother’s name was Naamah, an Ammonitess.” She was by blood an alien, and by religion a heathen.
Unhappy in many things, but unhappiest most in such a mother, he begins to be regarded more with pity than with astonishment. The letters written on water are hardly formed when they are filled up; on the other hand the finger that traces them on stone leaves no visible impression on its indurated service; but plastic clay, midway between what is hard and soft, offers to the gentlest finger a substance which both receives and retains an impression.
Such is the heart that youth and childhood offer to a mother’s influence. Hear how Cowper sings of the boy by a mother’s knee.—
“His heart, now passive, yields to thy command,
Secure it thine, its key is in thine hand.”
—GUTHRIE.
