O love of Son and Mother! Nor time nor tears can stain? Nor wastes in passionate dreams. * By permission of Grant Richards Company, Ltd. My chapter on " Mothers and Sons" has brought an unusually wide and warm response. I delight to think that so fine a theme should have triumphed over defects of handling, and should have touched exactly those for whom the paper was written. The words at the head of this page are quoted from a postcard: Manchester, 10-8-12. I thought you had already reached the top, but today's article crowns all. Deo Gratias. More, please. - Yours to command, A. B. The subject is indeed inexhaustible and reaches far and deep. It has been said that there are only two sorts of people in the world men and women,- and all relations between these two are cleansed and glorified by the idea of motherhood. This the Church of Rome, with her fine sense of humanity, has recognized in the Salutation, three times a day repeated from her belfries Ave Maria, gratia plena; benedicta tu in mulieribus. It must have occurred to many of us, when gazing at Millet's wonderful picture of The Angelus, that English laborers and artisans might well envy his French peasants this reiterated reminder of the glory of motherhood and all that it imports. It was not a Catholic country — or, rather not in a Catholic province but on the coast of Ulster, that one of the most brilliant and fascinating men of the Victorian agestatesman, orator, author, diplomatist, Proconsul,- the late Lord Dufferin, built a tower which commemorates his mother, the beautiful and famous Helen Sheridan; and Tennyson adorned it with one of his happiest inscriptions: - Helen's Tower, here I stand I should wear my crown entire. In earth's recurring Paradise. That tribute to the mutual love of Mother and Son, as a thing stronger and more durable than stone, has always seemed to me one of Tennyson's finest touches, and, by its ring of intense reality, it suggests that the poet no less than the statesman, was indeed a Mother's Son. A chivalric writer, depicting some young Cru sader-Knights on a Syrian battlefield, just as the host of Heathendom were closing in for their destruction, described them as "buoyed up in that moment of surpassing peril by the sublime yet pathetic assurance that He for whom they gave their lives would receive their souls and comfort their Mothers." In all annals of battle, whether romantic or historical, the same thought perpetually recurs, till it finds its homeliest utterance in the words of the dying lad on the field of Belmont "Tell Mother I'm sorry I ever laughed at her religion. I see now that she was right." But I said just now that the idea of motherhood covers and sanctifies all human relations. A lad who has really loved his Mother (for love and reverence must go hand in hand) will instinctively regard all women as sisters for his Mother's sake. The one noble element in chivalry, in some respects so mischievous, was that it taught every aspirant to Knighthood that his first duty was to protect the weak, and to shield Womanhood from every touch or even breath of wrong. What Burke so gloriously said of Marie Antoinette that " 'ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult "- should be true of every woman who lives in a country where the spirit of chivalry is not dead. She is surrounded by men and boys who have known a Mother's love and profited by it, and in each one of them she can claim a brother. Bishop King, who combined strength and gentleness in a singular harmony, thus advised a lad who sought his counsel: "A very good rule is, never to say anything to a girl that you would not like another fellow to say to your sister. You know the word 'flirt.' Don't be one. It is unkind to a girl to be played with. Anyone who is a flirt will never be married happily. He will be despised. . . . Treat all those of the opposite sex as sisters; and from this treatment will not only follow repugnance and shame at personal action, but repugnance against others treating womankind not as sisters." Here is the spirit of chivalry in a modern dress. The late Bishop Wilkinson of St. Andrews, who had ministered to Mr. Gladstone on his death-bed, made this striking allusion in his Funeral Sermon: "I like to think of him in his young manhood, on that day when, in the presence of only one intimate friend, he solemnly made up his mind that, whatever else he accomplished in his life, whether he succeeded or whether he failed, he would by God's help not rest until he was able to bring back from the dreary wilderness some of those poor women whose lives had been ruined by man's selfishness, man's thoughtless cruelty. I like to see him as the young knight in the ancient legend, girding on his armor for that lifelong effort." Chivalry again. But, though we are pledged soldiers for a great campaign, we need not always be fighting. Ours must be the attitude of the strong man armed, ready to strike a blow whenever the cause demands it; and our sisters will be all the readier to give us their friendship and their confidence because they know that we should be, if occasion arose, their champions. A woman's perception of the chivalrous nature in man -and its reverse- is the triumph of intuition. Whatever is good in man, woman's influence draws out and makes more gracious. It was a famous saying about a famous woman that "to have loved her was a liberal education"; and the society of good women is the most educative process through which a man can pass. It is not educative only, but disciplinary. A bumptious, or forward, or self-satisfied youth, reminded by a word or even a look that he has gone too far or made too free, has received a lesson by which, if there is any good in him, he will profit to the end of his days. I said when I first touched on this subject, that the great drawback to the system of Boarding-Schools is that it withdraws a boy too soon from his mother's care; and this might be added, that it secludes him from women's society. It deprives him of those daily lessons in courtesy, chivalry, and selfforgetfulness which the presence of women insensibly impresses; and then as Gibbon says, outraged nature will have her revenges. "Home! Sweet Home!" is still a possibility, and a good home is the nursery of all virtues and all graces. The goodness of a home is not dependent on wealth, or spaciousness, or beauty, or luxury. Everything depends upon the Mother. Her love is a sacramental benediction, and her watchfulness a spell which Satan fears. The Prophet of old time, when he desired to heal the noxious stream, "went forth unto the spring of waters, and cast the salt in there." A Mother's influence on the home is the salt cast in at the spring |