essness. Love is
born with the child. The mother presses it to her breast, and at once
her heart's tendrils twine about it.

It is a good while before the child becomes conscious of the wondrous
love that is bending over it, yet all the time the love is growing in
depth and tenderness. In a thousand ways, by a thousand delicate arts,
the mother seeks to waken in her child a response to her own yearning
love. At length the first gleams of answering affection appear--the
child has begun to love. From that hour the holy friendship grows.
The two lives become knit in one.

When God would give the world a great man, a man of rare spirit and
transcendent power, a man with a lofty mission, he first prepares a
woman to be his mother. Whenever in history we come upon such a man,
we instinctively begin to ask about the character of her on whose bosom
he nestled in infancy, and at whose knee he learned his life's first
lessons. We are sure of finding here the secret of the man's
greatness. When the time drew nigh for the incarnation of the Son of
God, we may be sure that into the soul of the woman who should be his
mother, who should impart her own life to him, who should teach him his
first lessons, and prepare him for his holy mission, God put the
loveliest and the best qualities that ever were lodged in any woman's
life. We need not accept the teaching that exalts the mother of Jesus
to a place beside or above her divine Son. We need have no sympathy
whatever with the dogma that ascribes worship to the Virgin Mary, and
teaches that the Son on his throne must be approached by mortals
through his more merciful, more gentle-hearted mother. But we need not
let these errors concerning Mary obscure the real blessedness of her
character. We remember the angel's greeting, "Blessed art thou among
women." Hers surely was the highest honor ever conferred upon any
woman.

"Say of me as the Heavenly said, 'Thou art
The blessedest of women!'--blessedest,
Not holiest, not noblest,--no high name,
Whose height misplaced may pierce me like a shame,
When I sit meek in heaven!"

We know how other men, men of genius, rarely ever have failed to give
to their mothers the honor of whatever of greatness or worth they had
attained. But somehow we shrink from saying that Jesus was influenced
by his mother as other good men have been; that he got from her much of
the beauty and the power of his life. We are apt to fancy th