The Mother's Ear | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 28, 1862

The Mother's Ear.

I HAVE been surprised at the sensitiveness of a mother's ear. There is something which no cultivation could accomplish in the ability to detect, among many other sounds, the sound which proceeds from a suffering infant's moan, and to which the mother of that infant alone is so sensitive. I was sitting in a circle of friends in a parlor, and between a mother and the door of that parlor. Suddenly, while almost every one in the room was conversing, I noticed a change in the manner of a young mother. No one heard a sound but that which proceeded from the happy company, except that young mother who had left her only child up stairs. She thought she heard, as it were, a call from the cradle. I was sure she was needlessly restless, and would have joined others in saying so, had I been asked my opinion. But nothing could persuade the mother to remain, and she passed away through that door, and was soon by her infant's side. She was correct in her judgment. It was her infant's almost inaudible moan. A few days afterward it was dangerously ill, and in a few more it was sleeping its last sleep.

How sensitive was that mother's ear to her infant's sorrow! How it discriminated between the noises around, and the sound from that lowly cradle, although those around were louder and more confident, although courtesy, and friendship, and pleasure, and intellectual enjoyment found a form and utterance in those sounds, yet nothing could drown that one feeble, plaintive groan of the offspring, though from afar off.

Now there is a passage which possesses great force by the side of this as its illustration. It is in Isa. xlix, 15: "Can a woman forget her sucking child that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee." We are God's offspring, and amid the temptations, the sorrows, the sins, the struggles, and the desires of a rebel world, the gentlest voice of a child of God shall be heard, heard above the triumphs, and shouts, and energies of earth. God's ear is more sensitive than any ear in the universe! Ah, what encouragement to all, even to the sad and sorrowful in his feebleness, who is only able to say, "God be merciful to me a sinner!"—Am. Presbyterian.