A Beautiful Tribute to Motherhood

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jan 21, 1915

A Beautiful Tribute to Motherhood

THE emperor of Germany, who speaks of his wife as a “pearl of great price,” once said: “I could wish no better for the men of my country than that the girls of Germany should follow the example of their empress and devote their lives, as she does her life, to the cultivation of the three great K’s, ‘Kirche, Kinder, Kueche’—church, children, cookery.” Speaking of her husband, she once said sweetly, “He is the emperor of Germany, but I am empress of the nursery.”

Jean Paul Richter writes: “Men govern and earn the glory, and the thousand watchful nights and sacrifices by which a mother purchases a hero or poet for the state are forgotten—not once counted; and so, one century after another, do mothers, unnamed and unthanked, send forth the arrows, the suns, the storm birds, and the nightingales of time.” One good mother is worth a hundred schoolmasters. Her influence has been called “the divinity of infancy.” Her smile is its sun’s hive, her word its mildest law, until the world has steeled the heart.—Selected.