Can a Mother Forget?

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 18, 1871

Can a Mother Forget?

CAN a mother forget? Not a morning, noon, or night, but she looks into a corner of the kitchen where you read Robinson Crusoe, and thinks of you as yet a boy. Mothers rarely become conscious that their children are grown out of their childhood. They think of them, advise them, write to them, as though not fourteen years of age. They cannot forget the child. Three times a day she thinks of those absent from the table and hopes the next year at farthest she may just “have her own family there.” Did Hannah forget Samuel? A short sentence full of household history, and running over with genuine mother’s love, is telling and beautiful: “Moreover his mother made a little coat, and brought it to him from year to year, when she came up with her husband to offer the yearly sacrifice.”

A mother mourning at her first-born’s grave or closing the eyes of a child in death, displays a grief whose very sacredness is sublime. But bitter, heavier than the stroke, is the desperation of a son who rushes over a crushed heart, into vices which he would hide even from the abandoned and vile.

Napoleon was once asked by a lady what France needed for the education of youth? and the short, profound reply was, “Mothers.”