“The mother has most to do with the child’s character while yet in the flexible state in which it receives its shape. The earliest exercises of thought, emotion, will, and conscience are all carried under her eye. She has to do not only with the body in its infancy, but with the soul in it’s childhood.  Both mind and heart are in her hands at the period when they take their first start for good or for evil. The children learn to lisp their first words and to form their first ideas under her teaching. They are almost always in her company and are insensibly to themselves and imperceptibly to her receiving a right or wrong bias from her.  She is the first model of character they witness; the first exhibitions of right and wrong in practice are what they see in her.  They are the constant observers of the passions, graces, virtues, and faults, which are shown in her words, temper, and actions. She is therefore, unconsciously to herself, educating them not only by designed teaching, but by all she does or says in their presence….It is therefore of immense importance that everyone who sustains this relation should have a high idea of her own power. She should be deeply and duly impressed with the potency of her influence on her children’s lives.”  ~John James Engell

“She says I shall now have one mouth the more to fill and two feet the more to shoe, more disturbed nights, more laborious days, and less leisure or visiting, reading, music, and drawing.   Well! This is one side of the story, to be sure, but I look at the other. Here is a sweet, fragrant mouth to kiss; here are two more feet to make music with their pattering about my nursery. Here is a soul to train for God; and the body in which it dwells is worth all it will cost, since it is the abode of a kingly tenant. I may see less of friends, but I have gained one dearer than them all, to whom, while I minister in Christ’s name, I make a willing sacrifice of what little leisure for my own recreation my other darlings had left me. Yes, my precious baby, you are welcome to your mother’s heart, welcome to her time, her strength, her health, her tenderest cares, to her lifelong prayers! Oh, how rich I am, how truly, how wondrously blest!”  ― Elizabeth Prentiss,

Oh that God would give every mother a vision of the glory and splendor of the work that is given to her when a babe is place in her bosom to be nursed and trained! Could she have but one glimpse in to the future of that life as it reaches on into eternity; could she look into its soul to see its possibilities; could she be made to understand her own personal responsibility for the training of this child, for the development of its life, and for its destiny,–she would see that in all Gods world there is no other work so noble and so worthy of her best powers, and she would commit to no others hands the sacred and holy trust given to her.

JR Miller