What an odious savor in Mrs. G.’s delicate nostrils would be the antiquated but pious friend who should, out of the plenitude of his love and good will for Mr. Grundy, pray, in the words of the Psalmist, that his wife might be a fruitful vine, and his children olive plants round about his table!
No! we do not, as a class, appreciate the dignity—I use the word advisedly—the dignity and privilege of maternity! In this respect, our English sisters are far ahead of us. The Hebrew women, under the Theocracy, understood it better still, when Rachel pined in her quiet tent for the murmur of baby-voices and the touch of baby-fingers, and Hannah knelt in the court of the temple, to supplicate, with strong crying and tears, that the holy fountains of motherly love within her heart might flow out upon offspring of her own. In those days it was the childless wife, and not she who had borne many sons and daughters, who besought that her reproach might be taken away; that she might be accounted worthy to be intrusted with the high duty of rearing children to swell the ranks of the Lord’s chosen people.
“If I felt as you do,” said a lady, sneeringly, to a friend of mine; “if I considered the gift of children a blessing, and the care of them a delightful task, I would not wait for the slow process by which Nature creates families, but adopt a dozen at a time from an asylum.”
“They would not be mine!” was the quiet reply.
I do not envy that mother her heart, who does not enter into the meaning of this rejoinder; who has not felt the delicious thrill of ownership in an object so lovely and precious as the helpless babe she has braved death itself to win; the awed delight of contemplating the new creation—living, intelligent, immortal—given to be hers! It may be—I have seen it somewhere asserted—that there is, after all, a species of sublimated selfishness in the ecstatic sweetness of the thought so well expressed by Emily Judson:—
“The pulse first caught its tiny stroke,
The blood its crimson hue from mine!
The life which I have dared invoke
Henceforth is parallel with Thine!”
The candid reader who has known the depth and strength of a mother’s love, her patience, constancy, and self-sacrifice, will, I fancy, agree with me in pronouncing the selfishness to be very “sublimated.”
Said Mr. Toots, upon the occasion of the birth of his fourth daughter—“The oftener we can repeat that extraordinary woman the better!” Everybody laughs at the proud husband’s praise of his spouse, but—ask your heart, loving mother, if there is not a strange fullness of joy in watching the reproduction of your traits, physical, mental, and moral, in your child? How many times a day does she bring back some half-forgotten scene of your own childhood? How frequently, at the expression of her fancies, or opinions, or desires, do you say, with a smile, a sigh—perchance a tear—“I felt, or thought, or longed the same at her years; it is her inheritance?” Is there not a joy yet greater, an inexpressible swelling of love and pride, as you see in the lineaments and gesture of your boy, the faithful portraiture of one dearer to you than your own soul? I am not talking now to those who have felt nothing of all this; from whom the knowledge of these sacred mysteries has been withheld, and who are incapable, from the barrenness and shallowness of their own spiritual natures, of ever entering fully into them. It is useless to say to these that motherhood is a holy thing, and offspring the boon of Heaven; that, amidst the wild clamor of woman’s rights and woman’s sphere, she best enacts the rôle appointed her by the wise Parent of all, does most to elevate her race, who rears strong, good men, and gentle, noble daughters to serve God and the generation to come. To the gross, all things are gross, and these truths are pearls, too clear in their purity to be trampled by such. I appeal to mothers—to brave, pious women who fear God and love their husbands—but who have yet never arisen to the perfect realization of the grandeur of the work assigned them; never thought of themselves as the architects of the nation’s fortunes, the sculptors, whose fair or foul handiwork is to outlast their age, to outlive Time, to remain through all Eternity. I would awaken those whom the prejudices of education or the plausible sophistries of the modern fashionable school have blinded to the deep significance of those words—“Behold, children are an heritage from the Lord, and the fruit of the womb is His reward!”
Women! sisters! be assured there is something tearfully and radically wrong in a system that teaches us to despise or refuse our rightful share in our Father’s riches! Look to it, lest haply ye be found to sin against God!
My second assertion is that it is a right of babies to have mothers.