In estimating the agencies which combine for child-shaping through child-training, the power of a mother’s love cannot be overestimated. There is no human love like a mother’s love. There is no human tenderness like a mother’s tenderness. And there is no such time for a mother’s impressive display of her love and tenderness toward her child as in the child’s earliest years of his life. That time neglected, and no future can make good the loss to either mother or child. That time improved, and all the years that follow it shall give added proof of its improvement.

Even when a man seems to be dead to every other influence for good, the recollection of a mother’s prayers and a mother’s tears often has a hold upon him which he neither can nor would[Pg 264] break away from. And a mother is so much to a man when he is a man, just because she was all in all to him when he was a child.

Although God calls himself our Father, he compares his love with the love of a mother, when he would disclose to us the depth of its tenderness, and its matchless fidelity. “As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you,” he says, as if in invitation to the sinner to come like a grieved and tired child, and lay down his weary head on his mother’s shoulder, where he is sure of rest and sympathy, and of words of comfort and cheer. “Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb?” asks God, as if to turn attention to that which is truest and firmest of anything we can know of human affection and fidelity. And then to show that he is a yet surer support than even mothers prove to their loved children, he adds, “Yea, they may forget, yet will not I forget thee.”

David, the man after God’s own heart, could find[Pg 265] no words which could express his abiding confidence in God, like those wherein he declares, “When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up.” Nor could he find any figure of the profoundest depth of human sorrow more forcible than that in which he says of himself, “I bowed down heavily, as one that mourneth for his mother.” When David’s greater Son was hanging on the cross in agony, with the weight of a lost world upon him, he could forget all his personal suffering, and could turn, as it were, for a moment, from the work of eternal redemption, to recognize the tenderness and fidelity of his agonized mother at his feet, and to commend her with his dying breath to the faithful ministry of the disciple whom he loved.

The Bible abounds with pictures of loving mothers and of a mother’s love,—Hagar, weeping in the desert over her famishing boy; Rachel mourning for her children, refusing to be comforted because they were not; Jochebed playing the servant to secure the privilege of nursing her babe[Pg 266] for the daughter of Pharaoh; Hannah joying before God over her treasure of a longed-for son; the true mother in the presence of Solomon, ready to lose her child that it might be saved; Rizpah, watching on the hill-top the hanging bodies of her murdered sons, month after month, from the beginning of harvest until the autumn rains, suffering “neither the birds of the air to rest on them by day, nor the beasts of the field by night;” the wife of Jeroboam, longing to be at the bedside of her dying son, and torn at heart with the thought that as soon as she should reach him there he must die; the widow of Zarephath, and the Shunammite woman, securing the intercession of the prophet for the restoration to life of their dead darlings; the mother of James and John pleading with Jesus for favors to her sons; the Syro-Ph?nician woman venturing everything, and refusing to be put aside, that she might win a blessing from Him who alone was able to restore to health and freedom her grievously vexed daughter; the mother of Timothy, teaching her son lessons by which the world[Pg 267] is still profiting; and so on through a long list of those who were representative mothers, chosen of God for a place in the sacred record, and whose like are about us still on every side.

And the Bible injunctions concerning mothers are as positive as the examples of their loving ministry are numerous. “Honor thy father and thy mother” is a commandment which has pre-eminence in the reward attached to it. “Forsake not the law of thy mother,” said Solomon; “and despise not thy mother when she is old.” It is indeed a “foolish man,” as well as an unnatural one, who “despiseth his mother,” or who fails to give her gratitude and love so long as she is spared to him. In all ages and everywhere, the true children of a true mother “rise up and call her blessed;” for they realize, sooner or later, that God gives no richer blessing to man than is found in a mother’s love. Even in the days when a queen-wife was a slave, a queen-mother was looked up to with reverence, not because she had been a queen, but because she was still the king’s mother. “A[Pg 268] mother dead!” wrote gruff and tender-hearted Carlyle. “It is an epoch for us all; and to each one of us it comes with a pungency as if peculiar, a look as of originality and singularity.” And it was of the mother whose death called out this ejaculation, of whom, while she was still living, Carlyle had written, “I thought, if I had all the mothers I ever saw to choose from, I would have chosen my own.”

A mother can never be replaced. She will be missed and mourned when she has passed away, however she may be undervalued by the “foolish son” to whom she still gives the wealth of her unappreciated affection. Indeed, the true man never, while his mother is alive, outgrows a certain sense of dependence on a loving mother’s sympathy and care. His hair may be whitened with age; he may have children, and even grandchildren, looking up to him in respect and affection; but while his mother lives she is his mother, and he is her boy. And when she dies he for the first time realizes the desolateness of a mother[Pg 269]less son. There is then no one on earth to whom he can look up with the never-doubting confidence and the never-lacking restfulness of a tired child to a loving mother. There is a shelter taken away from above his head, and he seems to stand unprotected, as never before, from the smiting sun and the driving storms of life’s pilgrimage. He can no more be called “My dear son” in those tones which no music of earth can equal. To him always:
“A mother is a mother still,
  The holiest thing alive.”

Biography is rich with illustrations of this truth, although the man whose mother is still spared to him need not go beyond his own experience to recognize its force. Here, for example, is testy old Dr. Johnson, bearish and boorish in many things. When he is fifty years old, and his mother is ninety, he writes to her in tenderness: “You have been the best mother, and, I believe, the best woman............