Mother by Orison Swett Marden

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Oct 12, 1911

Mother

By Orison Swett Marden

“All that I am or hope to be,” said Lincoln, after he had become president, “I owe to my mother.”

“My mother was the making of me,” said Thomas Edison, recently. “She was so true, so sure of me; and I felt that I had some one to live for; some one I must not disappoint.”

“All that I have ever accomplished in life,” declared Dwight L. Moody, the great evangelist, “I owe to my mother.”

“To the man who has had a mother, all women are sacred for her sake,” said Jean Paul Richter.

The testimony of great men in acknowledgment of the boundless debt they owe to their mothers would make a record stretching from the dawn of history to to-day. Few men, indeed, become great who do not owe their greatness to a mother’s love and inspiration.

How often we hear people in every walk of life say, “I never could have done this thing but for my mother. She believed in me, encouraged me, when others saw nothing in me.”

“A kiss from my mother made me a painter,” said Benjamin West.

A distinguished man of to-day says: “I would never have reached my present position had I not known that my mother expected me to reach it. From a child, she made me feel that this was the position she expected me to fill; and her faith spurred me on and gave me the power to attain it.”

It is a strange fact that our mothers, the molders of the world, should get so little credit and should be so seldom mentioned among the world’s achievers.

The world sees only the successful son; the mother is but a round in the ladder upon which he has climbed. Her name or face is never seen in the papers; only her son is lauded and held up to our admiration. Yet it was that sweet, pathetic figure in the background that made his success possible.

Many a man is enjoying a fame which is really due to a self-effacing, sacrificing mother. People hurrah for the governor, or mayor, or congressman, but the real secret of his success is often tucked away in that little, unknown, unappreciated, unheralded mother. His education and his chance to rise may have been due to her sacrifices.

The very atmosphere that radiates from and surrounds the mother is the inspiration and constitutes the holy of holies of family life.

“In my mother’s presence,” said a prominent man, “I become for the time transformed into another person.”

How many of us have felt the truth of his statement! How ashamed we feel when we meet her eyes, that we have ever harbored an unholy thought, or dishonorable suggestion! It seems impossible to do wrong while under that magic influence. What revengeful plans, what thoughts of hatred and jealousy, have been scattered to the four winds while in the mother’s presence! Her children go out from communion with her resolved to be better men, nobler women, truer citizens.

The greatest heroine in the world is the mother. No one else makes such sacrifices, or endures anything like the sufferings that she uncomplainingly endures for her children.—Orison Swett Marden, in Success.