Did She Love Him?

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Apr 17, 1884

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 10, No. 16.

Did She Love Him?

A boy fell from one of the high beams of a barn, and was carried to his mother, sadly crushed and broken. A skillful surgeon was called. He came, looked the boy over, and only gave him a soothing dose.

"You are doing nothing to cure him," said the mother. "Why don't you set his bones?"

"It would be useless, madam. Your son has received fatal injury; we will not add to his sufferings by useless treatment of his fractures."

"Fatal!" cried the mother, indignantly; "To what purpose then is your skill? Set every bone in his body."

The surgeon obeyed. It was before the use of anæsthetics, and when many mechanical surgical appliances now in use were unknown. The boy was tortured, but the mother looked on, aided and abetted in the torture, denied all her son's piteous pleadings, yet shed not a tear. She nursed him with almost superhuman patience and endurance through months of misery, during which he lay bound, and often reproached her that she did not let him die of his pain. He did not die, nor become a helpless cripple, but recovered the full use of his entire body. And that body had no common mind. He was a genius, a well-known American author, who lived seventy-eight years.

A thought awakened by these facts, however, not the man's history, is our subject.

We suffer; in our agony we wish we were dead, or had never been born. We cry to God for help, and think he does not hear us because our pain is not removed. Again, we behold the suffering of those we love better than ourselves, and our heart's wail for their anguish is more piteous than for our own. We say, "How can a God of love, a heavenly Father omnipotent, see it without interposing; nay, more, order it, and deny our pleadings?" Satan tempts us, "Can there be a God of love?" and we are in danger of saying in our heart—like the fool—"There is no God."

Is there a suggestion of help for all this in the history of those broken bones and that mother's relation to them? Has our heavenly Father taken the desperate cause of our fallen, disjointed humanity in hand, because he would have life, not death, our portion? Can Omnipotence, even, interpose? That mother could have interposed to save her son from suffering, yet did not. Did she love him? Answer, every mother who has stood beside a son's cross, with the sword "through thine own soul also." Does God love us though we suffer, though we cry and he is silent? Let his word answer:—

"God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son;" "The Lord is not willing that any should perish;" "Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth;" "As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you; and ye shall be comforted."

Oh, well is it for us, with our broken bones, that we have a Father whose love, tender as a mother's, is wiser for us than are our doctors, or than we are for ourselves!—Christian Weekly.