It is often said that the baby brings a vast heritage of love with it into the world, and I believe in the truth of this. But sometimes the love gets into the wrong heart, if I may use such an expression, instead of filling that of the mother, who, regarding the helpless creature as a hindrance to what she calls “pleasure,” is willing to relinquish the privilege of caring for her child to other hands. If these are truly womanly hands, and the nurse has in her a motherly heart, the child may lose little by the change during its first years. Later on, Nature asserts herself and only a mother’s love can satisfy a child’s yearnings.
On this subject of motherhood, as in all that you and I, my dear girl friends, have talked about together, we need to look into the Book of books for light and guidance.
Motherhood is part of Nature’s—or should I not rather say of God’s—plan for womanhood. Let us look back together at the earliest chapter of human history, and note how children were regarded then.
Eve, so named because she was “the mother of all living,” or “life,” as the Revised Version gives it, clasped her first-born to her breast and cried in her exultant joy, “I have gotten a man from the Lord.” She looked upon her babe as the direct gift of God. She, like many a mother in after days, could not foresee the sin and the sorrow that would shadow his manhood and her own heart. But in holding her infant treasure to her breast, she would have a present joy and sense of riches that words cannot describe. She, the only human mother, with the only human infant in the wondrous new world which was to be peopled by her children, must have had sensations which none of her descendants could possibly repeat.
And yet, believe me, every loving mother who is worthy of the name, has a like feeling of riches, when she can say, “This is my child, my very own. This wonderful little body is given me to feed, clothe and guard. It is my privilege to see that it is fed with food convenient for it, that the tender frame is shielded from too great heat or biting cold, that it is kept from places and things which might injure its health, or prevent its growth into sturdy boyhood or girlhood.” The true mother was proud of her name in the old days of Bible history, and to be childless was to be a sad and dissatisfied woman.
When Seth was born, after Abel had been slain by his brother, the joyful thought of Eve was that the vacant place in her motherly heart was filled again, and she cried, “God hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel whom Cain slew.”
She had sons and daughters, we know not how many, during the ages which followed, but there is no detailed history of them. Still it gladdens our hearts to know of the joy of that first mother, when Seth was given to her in place of the good son who “was not.”
Pass with me down the ages and look into the tent of Sarah, when she held in her arms the child of promise, so long hoped for, even against hope as it seemed. “And Sarah said, ‘God hath made me to laugh; everyone that heareth will laugh with me.’”
Childless Rachel bemoaned her hard fate and cried, “Give me children, or else I die.” Then when Joseph was born she gave him the name which meant “added,” and said, “The Lord add to me another son.”
Yet another picture for us to look at together, my dear ones. It is that of Jacob as he met his brother Esau. After the brothers had embraced and kissed each other, Esau “lifted up his eyes and saw the women and the children, and said, ‘Who are these with thee?’ And he said, ‘The children which God hath graciously given thy servant.’”