Motherly | AdventAI

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Jul 3, 1879

Motherly.

WHAT a dear old Saxon epithet is the word "motherly!" Motherly kindness, attention, nurture! The word is never unwelcome when fairly applied. Motherly influence; who has not felt it? Motherly love; who has not joyed in it? Motherly self-denial; often the secret heading of the longest chapters of her life, the memory of which long survives them all. Motherly self-sacrifice; true to the last, often reappearing in some posthumous expression, like the voice from the tomb. My friend, the Rev. John Burbidge, of St. Stephens', Sheffield, put it to the mothers and sons of his church: "Does not history tell us how St. Augustine, Theodoret, Basil, and St Chrysostom owed everything to a mother's prayers. Have we not read how Bishop Hall dedicated to the service of Christ by his mother on her death-bed? How Payson traced all his hopes and his usefulness to this Christian nurture of his home; how Brainerd ascribed his deep religious feelings to the education of his early years; how Philip Henry and his five sisters avowed that what piety they possessed they owed, under God, to their parents; how James Montgomery traced his love for spiritual things to the instruction received in childhood; how the mother of the Wesleys left impressions on the characters of her illustrious sons which were never effaced; how Romaine, Doddridge, Felix Neff, Legh Richmond, Richard Knill, and Robert Moffat, all tell of the melting and moulding influence of the Christian homes amid which they were reared."—Quiver.