The Home Circle by John Greenleaf Whittier

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jan 19, 1882

The Home Circle.

By John Greenleaf Whittier

A PICTURE memory brings to me— I look across the years, and see Myself beside my mother’s knee.

I feel her gentle hand restrain My selfish moods, and know again A child’s blind sense of wrong and pain.

But, wiser now, a man gray grown, My childhood’s needs are better known, My mother’s chastening love I own.

Gray grown, but in our Father’s sight, A child still groping for the light, To read his works and ways aright.

I bow myself beneath his hand; That pain itself for good was planned, I trust, but cannot understand.

I fondly dream it needs must be That, as my mother dealt with me, So with his children dealeth he.

I wait, and trust the end will prove That here and there, below, above, The chastening heals, the pain is love! —J. G. Whittier.