Mothers in Israel
When the Hebrew matron called out to Joab from the walls of the beleaguered city of Abel, and exhorted him to spare the town and “a mother in Israel,” she did more than she bargained for. She not only saved her own life, but she originated a fine proverbial expression which has constantly been applied to good women who have distinguished their maternity by a beautiful and godly influence. The holyhearted Hannah heads the roll of these model mothers — the woman who dedicated her first-born son to God in those memorable words —” for this child I prayed, and the Lord hath given me my petition which I asked of him. Therefore I have lent
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him to the Lord; as long as he liveth, he shall be lent to the Lord.” Samuel also heads the roll of eminent servants of God who owed an incalculable debt to wise maternal influence.
What was true in ancient times has been true ever since. At the starting point of a vast majority of the best Christian lives stands a Christian mother. When I was a student in Princeton Theological Seminary the chairman of the examining board requested all of us who had praying mothers to rise up, and nearly the whole one hundred and fifty leaped instantly to their feet. There we stood, a living witness to the power of a mother’s prayers and of her shaping influence and example. My own widowed mother was one of the best that God ever gave to an only son. She was more to me than school, or college, or pastor, or all combined. In our early rural home the first Sabbath-school I ever attended had but one scholar, and she was the superintendent; the only book studied was God’s book, and committed to memory. During my infancy she dedicated me to the Christian ministry, and kept that steadily before her own eye and mine. I cannot now fix the date of my conversion; it was her constant influence that led me gradually along, and I grew into a religious life under her potent training, and by the power of the Holy Spirit working through her untiring agency. If all mothers were like her the “church in the house” would be one of the best feeders of the church in the public sanctuary.
We ministers must not take on airs. There is a ministry that is older and deeper and more potent than ours; it is that ministry that presides over the crib, and impresses the first gospel influence upon
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the infant soul. Before the pulpit begins or the Sunday-school begins the mother has already begun, and has been moulding the plastic wax of character for weal or woe, for heaven or hell. A prodigious power this; it is the same power which sent Samuel out of the godly home of Hannah and wicked Ahaziah out of the home of godless Jezebel. Both of them “walked in the way of his mother.” Far be it from me to underrate the influence of fathers for good or evil. But still the fact remains that it is mainly the mother who shapes the home influence and imparts to it its prevailing atmosphere; for the most important part of moral education is atmospheric. The purity or impurity, the tonic or the demoralizing qualities of that atmosphere of the home, depend, for the most part, on the mother: the sovereign of
the home. There is her throne; there her 16 sway; there she can make or mar the destiny of the immortal soul beyond any one this side of the throne of God. Among eminent living ministers none preaches the great vital doctrine of the atonement more powerfully than Dr. Newman Hall of London; he almost idolized his mother, and has told me that the first words she ever taught him were, “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son.” That ’ text became the key-note of his grand ministry, and of his world-known tractate, “Come to Jesus.” Susannah Wesley’s hand rings all the Methodist church bells around the globe to-day. Suppose that Lord Byron had been reared by such a mother as Newman Hall and the Wesleyshad; the world might have escaped the moral leprosy that tainted so many of the brilliantly bad pages thatjie scattered far and wide. Would that I could burn it into the heart of every mother who reads these lines that, under God, she is chiefly responsible for the moral and spiritual welfare of her household. If the mother is a frivolous fashion -worshipper, or is utterly prayerless and irreligious, or even careless of the spiritual welfare of the children, the whole home atmosphere catches the taint. The downward pull of her home preaching is quite too strong for the upward pull of the best preaching in God’s house on the Sabbath. On the other hand, if she does her utmost to make the religion of Jesus attractive to her family, if she is watchful of every opportunity to lead them Christward, if she follows up the effect of Sabbath-gospel by the powerful influence of home-gospel, then there is almost a moral certainty that God will send his converting grace into that household. Oh, mothers in Israel, try the blessed experiment!
Carlyle found the teachings and the granitic piety of his old Scotch mother about the chief breakwater against skepticism; his rugged roughness seems always to have sweetened in her presence. That eminent preacher, Richard Cecil of London, tells us that when he was a youth he tried his utmost to be an infidel; but his mother’s beautiful and eloquent Christianity was too much for him. He never could answer that. Sometimes she used to talk to him and weep as she talked. He says, “I flung out of the house with an oath; but I wept, too, when I got into the street. Sympathy is the powerful engine of a mother.” Yes, there is a power in her love, when it is reinforced by the grace of God, to reach and bring down the most stubborn heart; it is a power that goes miles deeper than pulpit appeals, for it links itself with the primal instincts of our nature. If every parent were thus faithful in prayer and winsome example we should behold what Dr. Horace Bushnell called “the out-populating power of the Christian stock.” The family would become the nursery and training-school of religion. The home of natural birth would become the place of the new birth, and children — instead of running loose on the open common of sin, to be pursued by “revival efforts” in after years — would be led early to Jesus and into his church fold.
“Take this child away and nurse it for me, and I will give thee thy wages,” said the Egyptian princess to Jochebed, the mother of Moses. She got her wages in better coin than silver or gold. She got them in the joys a mother feels when she yields up a part of herself to sustain her darling child; she got them in the love of the babe she nursed; she got them in the glorious service which her son wrought for Israel in after years. She was paid in the heavenly coin with which God pays good mothers. For all her anxieties, and all her exertions to preserve the life of her “goodly child,” was she abundantly rewarded.
When God lays a new-born babe in the arms of a mother he says to her heart, “Take this child and nurse it for me and I will give thee thy wages.” The answer of maternal love should be, “Oh God, thou hast put thy noblest workmanship into my hands. I accept the precious trust. I will shelter this young life under thy mercy-seat. I will be truthful that it may never learn falsehood. I will nurse this soul in its infancy with the sincere milk of love that in after years it may bear strong meat for strong service of God and righteousness. Oh, Heavenly Father, make my life in harmony with thyself, that this young life may reflect thy blessed image in following my example!”
To such pious fidelity God offers the highest wages; he pays the heart’s claim in the heart’s own coin. Faithful Hannah found her great reward in Samuel’s great care«r. Moses on the Mount was the “wages” of the poor Hebrew mother who cradled him in her basket of rushes. Saint Augustine’s mighty service for the gospel was the best reward that God could give Monica; our Washington was God’s splendid recompense to Washington’s good mother. The Lord never breaks his covenant with those who fulfill their covenant with him.