LOVE FOR MOTHER | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Aug 16, 1899

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 25, No. 33.

LOVE FOR MOTHER.

WHEN gruff old Dr. Johnson was fifty years old, he wrote to his aged mother as if he was still her wayward but loving boy: "You have been the best mother, and, I believe, the best woman in the world. I thank you for all your indulgence to me, and beg forgiveness for all I have done ill, and for all that I omitted to do well." John Quincy Adams did not part with his mother until he was nearly or quite as old as this; yet his cry even then was: "O God, could she have been spared yet a little longer! . . . Without her the world seems to me like a solitude." When President Nott, of Union College, was more than ninety years old, and had been for half a century a college president, as strength and sense failed him in his dying hours, the memory of his mother's tenderness was fresh and potent, and he could be hushed to needed sleep by a gentle patting on the shoulder, and the singing to him of old-time lullabies, as if his mother were sitting by his bedside in loving ministry, as she had well-nigh a century before. The true son never grows old to a true mother.