THE MEETING PLACE OF "THE SENATE"
Astonished as if He Had Seen a Vision
In determining what kind of women these mothers were we are to compare their standards, not with ours now, but with the standards of the times in which they lived.
When revisiting the earth the ordinary life of the people had in it a great fascination. I wonder that the pleasures of memory and association are not more vividly realized in connection with the people we have known. The lessons are very salutary. With the hope of having my ideas more nearly approach my ideals I resolved increasingly to cultivate admiration. If called upon off-hand to cite one of the most striking impressions it would be that a pure, beautiful, intelligent, and well-bred woman "is the most attractive object of vision and contemplation in the world." I thought that nature had lavished her gifts about equally without and again within the human family. It is not a question of six of one and half a dozen of the other, but of half a dozen and a dozen. There is no answer to the question, What will God give us when he takes the sea? It is its only parallel. Without detracting from it there is also a world of beauty in an amazing river, always arriving, always departing; its banks wondrously deeply colored with green and gold. The mountains and the canyon and the waterfall have commanding attractions. These are without the human race, but for objects of study and enthusiasm and deference I turn to those made but little lower than the angels and crowned with glory and honor.
Let me add another recollection of the moment, that my eyes, my ears, my whole soul seemed sometimes to be just opening upon what appeared to me a new fact that such a mother of charming character, such as I used to see, was the day-star of that apotheosis of mother which reached its climax in the last year of the German war. A nation does not know what it has until it comes to exhibit it.
Retrospect is Cheering
The son of such a mother who became philanthropic looked benevolent. The commercialized look their part. Business men are in the saddle. Sons succeed sires as we pass into trade. The teachers and accountants and the scholars looked somewhat bookish. The boys had been making faces. Each man had made his. I never knew a man equally transfigured with one I saw. It is not guessing, it is not flattery, it is exact truth. It is not to be discussed under general rules. It is a real case with a particular history. It is a confirmed expression. It has atmosphere, almost a dim remote shade of halo. This is labeled on him for the townspeople to read. It fell to me thus to take a few short lessons in heredity. On returning to the homes of these people I remembered the pictures they had upon their walls that were all new and different to boyhood's eyes and seemed a real part of the make-up of the town. I now turn to the belief that they had their influence on the families. The religious portrayal of the child Samuel and so of others were silent evangelists and remained right there till they fixed an impression. I remember that mothers held their boys up to these pictures and encouraged them to talk to them, which they did, and now they report the conversation. Queenly mothers! Blessed among women shall they be!
"All my fears are laid aside,
If I but remember only
Such as these have lived and died!"
You may think that children cannot understand or don't care. They can understand and they do care. It is not a matter of the mind only but of the instinct. Mother's chair and father's Bible make a place for themselves in the family history. In one year, 1782, there were born in four families residing in three different states Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, Lewis Cass, and Martin Van Buren. The families were undistinguished as such from the multitude of others about them. Not so, however, with the sons, for just the reason that has now come under our observation.
The woman who stands in her humble doorway and waves her tearless adieu to her brave enlisted son is no less a hero than he. She remains to keep the home fires burning and suffers a thousand deaths through her affections and fears. She makes the larger sacrifice for she would give many lives for the boy who has but one to lose.
No Love Like Mother Love
A mother with a baby lying across her knees was asked, "Do you love it?" She looking up, her face radiant, with the light indescribable, said, taking a very deep breath, "I love it so that if Christ had not gone to Calvary to give my boy life eternal, if by so doing I could secure life eternal for him, I would go to hell that he might go to heaven."
A soldier, returning home, was telling a mother about her son found dying on the field after a battle. Said she, "I wish I had been there." "You were there all right," was the rejoinder, "you came first to the boy's mind. He had your name on his lips when he died." The mother has first place when the boy is in the stress of life. Ambulance men and nurses find her in sweet companionship when they reach the wounded boy. These were his passions, love of mother, home, and country. We had the evidences on the surface of the life that was lived within.
If Archimedes had a station on which to rest his lever he could move the world. The world had been moved by a power unknown to him. Our country is the station where the lever rested.
"Turning the Bend in the Road"
Never before in all the history of our world have so many deaths occurred from war in so short a time. The very gates of death would seem to have been literally crowded by such multitudes passing through them. The soldiers have given to the world "a new death." Fresh inspiration was imparted to the French heart by the soldier at Verdun, a mere lad, who, wounded, called upon the dead to rise and fight the Germans. There is a spiritual partnership between dead heroes and living patriots. The Kaiser, in addressing his troops, made this utterance, "No mercy will be shown, no prisoners will be taken. The Huns, under King Attila, made a name for themselves which is still mighty in traditions and legends today." He omitted from his thought that part of the "traditions and legends" on which our minds are dwelling. The old chroniclers relate that Peter and Paul appeared to Attila in camp and terrified him with threats, a visit immortalized by Raphael. This factor that a governor of Judea had not reckoned with, was suggested to Pilate's wife. A woman's intuitions do not ask to have a cautionary signal repeated. She does not mean to invite tragedy and go spell-bound to destruction. An acknowledged leader in modern art, Kaulbach, so depicts character and so sees it in action and situation as to take a spectator by storm. With great power he reveals the spirits of the Huns and Romans who perished under the walls of the eternal city as renewing the combat in the air. A characteristic trait of the Germans appears by displaying the ruler of the Huns as an equal with the figure of the Teutonic "Gott." The Huns who destroyed seventy cities in Greece and barbarously murdered eleven thousand virgins, whose bones are preserved in the church of St. Ursula in Cologne, found that angel forces were against them. Those whom they had slain reappeared so that they had to encounter an immortal assemblage which had been mustered to resist them.
Presence of Our Celestial Helpers
"Alas, my master, how shall we do?" said the servant of Elisha in terror, when, his eyes being opened, he saw the mountains full of horses and chariots of fire. Our soldiers with rapturous joy testified that guardian spirits watched over them. The Scriptures abound with allusions to invisible benefactors. Shakespeare, to whom no side of human nature was unknown, with splendid genius, having to deal with the irresolute temper of Hamlet, calls to his aid a factor from the militant hosts of heaven. "Look! my lord! It comes." It was his father's spirit in arms. "Lend thy serious hearing to what I shall unfold, list, list, oh list." It is often stated that the great Charlemagne is not dead but on occasions places himself at the head of the nation, to lead it forward again to victory and glory. The world does not fight its battles for nothing. It would be just as erroneous to speak lightly of Marathon or Waterloo or Bunker Hill, or Vicksburg, or the third Battle of Piave which ended the German war by removing Austria-Hungary from the field and creating an indefensible Bavarian front, as it would be to underrate the significance of our recent national awakening. On revisiting the earth I felt in every place a great ground swell of national feeling. War is the last thing in the world to go according to program. This keeps people guessing and wakeful and interesting to others because they are themselves so interested. The whole country had become a great university for the study of folks in their elemental character. We can get a helpful vision when we take a straight look at people, elevated in feeling so preoccupied as to be unconscious of the self-revelation they are making. Shakespeare is right when he makes love control the destinies of his heroines. They may aspire reasonably but they were never meant to trample upon their own hearts and the hearts of others. We believe there are few men whose ambition has not been at some time during their lives the very slave of their affections. The great yearning of old and young in affections as well as intellect is to be appreciated. We are sure that there is a friend or lover for us somewhere, a companion for every thought and wish.
Out of Evil Cometh Good
The mother has come to her own as a by-product of the war. Such is her elevation that you will explore the pages of history and read the annals of mankind in vain to find anything that is a parallel to it. And now comes Governor Coolidge of Massachusetts stating by proclamation that when Lincoln's mother, "a wonderful woman, faded away in his tender years from her death bed in humble poverty, she dowered her son with greatness. There can be no proper observance of a birthday which forgets the mother." It has been a profoundly moving thought, when crossing the ocean, that two miles underneath there lay the live Atlantic telegraph cord stretching from one shore to the other. Vitalized with living messages of love and welfare, with the speed of lightning, on Mother's Day, the mysterious current communicated to the country the number of letters and the weight of the mail in tons that were on their way to gladden the mother who was keeping the home fires burning. Some women who are mothers started a wave of moral power which will never cease to roll until it has enveloped the earth. "Thy son liveth" is an assurance that, with a new accent, is now given when a boy makes the supreme sacrifice. His life hitherto has been but preparative. The separation of the living and the dead is less complete than formerly. The voters in Baldwin, Maine, paid tribute to the only boy that, from that town, died in the service, by standing, one hundred and fifty of them, in silence with their heads bowed. It is reported that the lips of three or four of the veterans moved as though uttering a prayer for the lad. Thus a new attitude is taken by many people toward death and towards the departed. Some say they feel as close as ever to those who, though they have turned a leaf in their biography, are characters in a story that still goes on. The feature of the war has been "the thinning of the veil between life and death." Forever living, incapable of death, seems the new verdict touching those promising young men who while they paid the price, bequeathed to those who survived, the glory and the honor.
Pushed by Unseen Hands
It is believed that we have lived to see the meting out of some divine awards. "Germany's collapse is the most dramatic judgment in the history of the world." In all the growth of Christianity, no such certitude has been so universally and emphatically expressed, touching the continuance of human personality. It is the diapason of a new literature produced by the war. It colors correspondence. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle feels that death has not robbed him of his son's companionship. The family feeling seems to continue unimpaired. "We are seven" is the sentiment, when "we are not all here," but "some are in the church-yard laid."
"All houses wherein men had lived and died
Are haunted houses. Through the open doors
The harmless phantoms on their errands glide,
With feet that make no sound upon the floors.
We meet them at the doorway, on the stair,
Along the passages they come and go;
Impalpable impressions on the air,
A sense of something moving to and fro."