Mother Love | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · May 27, 1897

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 23, No. 21.

Mother Love.

A leaflet sent out by the Woman Suffrage movement tells us that when Miss Willard, years ago, was seeking and praying for a remedy to "be set over against the appetite of the drinker and the avarice of the saloon-keeper," this answer was whispered to her:—

Set over against the appetite of the drinker and the avarice of the saloon-keeper the undying mother love of the home.

A blessed answer indeed; but it has been perverted to be made the foundation of a woman suffrage movement. Now we are not going to discuss the question of woman suffrage, but we do say that "undying mother love of the home" has no necessary connection with it. Suffrage is demanded for political purposes, for compulsory measures, to compel saloon-keepers, and to restrain liquor-drinkers. But mother love is divine. It can not be compelled; it can not compel by political or civil force; it wins by a power stronger than all compulsion. It is that which binds the son to home and mother and God from the earliest infancy, and so furnishes a mighty bond of Christian manhood by which other men may be rescued and bound. It is a force which, to a limited extent, has been potent of good from the time of Eve, "the mother of all living," down to the present time; and there is no way by which the world can be more greatly helped to-day than by converting the mothers, not to political means, measures, or methods, but to "the undying mother love of the home," having its center and circumference in the love of God, through faith in the power of Christ Jesus. Woman suffrage may give women the "equal rights" they are clamoring for, but it will not give them more abundant grace or power for good.