Honour thy mother MOTHERHOOD AND ITS IDEAL

Ex. 20:12 This precept of the Decalogue has its perpetual echo and long development in the Scriptures at large. One after another there the forms of noble women, seen distinct or dim, but all beautiful with wise and honored motherhood, pass by before us.

We see Hannah, and Elisheba, and the lady of Shunem, and her who taught virtue to King Lemuel; and then Elizabeth and Salome, and the Scripture-loving Eunice with her Timothy at her knee, while white-haired Lois, the grandmother, groups herself the third with the two over the oracles of God. Supreme among them all, we contemplate the maternal Maid of Nazareth, the crowning flower of womanhood for ever, her through whom God the Son of God entered man’s life and a human home, and to whom he was subject there.

Full of the mother’s honor is the great book of Proverbs, that luminous manual of godly living, with its character-building power. “I was my mother’s son”; “Forsake not the law of thy mother”; “A foolish man” (and only he, the witless victim of his own self-will, for such is “the fool” of the Proverbs) “despiseth his mother.” In one wonderful prophetic utterance the mother’s strong consoling tenderness is taken up by the Eternal himself as the only worthy image of his own. He clasps to his infinite heart the tired and broken hearts of his human children.

And lo! an ineffable maternity is found to live, and breathe, and burn in the depth of the Almighty Father’s love: “As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.”