So this despised slave woman, this mother has this to her credit, that she mothered and trained one of the greatest men that ever set foot on this earth. She took a little boy named Moses to her heart and trained him for God. She had him for a little while. Then he went away to the big University. But he stood true. She speaks to him as she holds him close in the twilight. She says, "Laddie, do not forget how God has watched over you. One day when death was suspended above your baby head by a thread, one day when your life was frailer than a gossamer thread, I took a queer little basket and lined it with pitch, and also with faith and with prayer. And I put you afloat, and God preserved you and sent you back into these arms. And I carried you and cared for you. And now when you are grown you won't forget. You won't prove disloyal to your mother and you won't forget your mother's God."
And Moses did not forget. And one day the little laddie who had once been carried about in the arms of a slave mother, was a big broad-shouldered man. And he had a big broad-shouldered faith, and he trusted in a big broad-shouldered God. And in the strength of that faith, and in the might of that God he lifted an enslaved people in his arms and carried them clean across the wilderness. And he made possible an Isaiah and a Jeremiah and a David. And he made possible the birth of Jesus Christ. And he became the blesser and enricher of all the nations of the earth. And this mother, whose name is not well known in the annals of men, but whose name is known in Heaven to-day, had the rich reward of knowing that she mothered a man who fathered a nation and blessed a world.
Oh, it is a blessed reward, the reward of success in the high enterprise of motherhood. I know of no joy that can come to a father's or a mother's heart that is comparable to the joy that their own children can give them. I have seen sweet-faced mothers look upon their children when there was enough joy in those faces to have raised the temperature of Heaven.
But while it is true that none can bring us so much joy, it is also true that none can so utterly break our hearts. To see disease take our children in hand and wreck their bodies is painful, but it is as joy in comparison to seeing sin steal the moral rose from their cheek and the sparkle of innocence and purity from their eyes. But the deepest of all damning griefs is that grief that comes to us when we realize that we failed, and that their ruin is due to sin and unfaithfulness in ourselves.
Do you hear the wild outcry from that broken-hearted king named David? There he stands upon the wall and looks away across the wistful plain. A lone runner is coming. He knows he is a messenger from the battlefield. "Good tidings," he shouts. But the king has no ear for good tidings. His one question is this, "Is the young man Absalom safe?" And the runner does not rightly answer his question. Then the second messenger comes with the news of his son's death. And there is no more pathetic cry in literature than that that breaks from the lips of this pathetic king. "O my son Absalom, O Absalom, my son, my son!" He is sobbing over his lost boy. But there is an added pang to his grief. It is the awful pang that comes from the torturing fear that he himself is in large measure responsible for the loss of his boy. And there is no more bitter agony than that.
Oh, men and women, let us who are fathers and mothers spare ourselves David's terrible agony. Let us spare our children Absalom's tragic ruin. Let us give ourselves the joys of this old time mother. While our children are about us, may we hear the very voice of God speaking to us on their behalf, saying: "Take this child and train it for me and I will give thee thy wages." And wages we shall receive just as surely as did this mother of Moses. We will be privileged to love, to give, to bless. And God Himself can give no richer reward than that.
XV
A GOOD MAN'S HELL—MANASSEH
Jeremiah 15:4
"And I will cause them to be removed into all the kingdoms of the earth because of Manasseh." The prophet of the Lord is here fixing the responsibility for the downfall of Jerusalem. He says that the wreck was due in an especial sense to one man. He makes it very plain that it was one man's hands that had planted the infernal bomb that was destined in later years to blast the foundation from under the nation. "I will cause them to be removed into all the kingdoms of the earth because of Manasseh."