The Love That Will Not Let Us Go

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Tacoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · May 16, 1907

The Love That Will Not Let Us Go

NIGHT was upon the city, and the children of darkness were in the streets. A mother moved slowly along in the crowd, looking eagerly and anxiously into the faces of those who passed, and whenever the swinging door of a saloon flashed a glare across the pavement, she turned quickly to look within the place where she thought perhaps her son might be.

She was searching for him, searching with motherly disregard of her surroundings, intent upon taking him home. That was her one mission in the crowd, to find and to take home her son. She found him at last, a pitiable figure; and he had no desire to go home. He had broken with his ideals, he had cast love to the winds, and the bestial in him held the reins and the whip.

But in that mother's heart was a passion stronger than the beast in the boy, a love so determined in its purpose, so compelling in its steady pull upon the boy's better self, that he did go home in spite of the clamor and tug of his lusts. Then, as before, and afterward, the cry of that mother in prayer and in any voicing of her love for him was ever the same: “I can not, can not, let him go!” Nor did she let him go until from a clean life, moving quietly on day by day, the Lord took him out of the fight.

What that mother did for her son, is done for every one of us day by day.—Sunday School Times.