An aged mother is almost omnipotent in comfort. Why? At seventy years of age she has been through it all. At seven o’clock in the morning she goes over to comfort a young mother who has just lost her babe. Grandmother knows all about that trouble. Fifty years ago she felt it. At twelve o’clock of that day she goes over to comfort a widowed soul. She knows all about that. She has been walking in that valley of shadow twenty years. At four o’clock in the afternoon some one knocks at the door wanting bread, She knows all about that.
Two or three times in her life she came to her last loaf. At ten o’clock that night she goes over to sit up with some one who is severely sick. She knows all about it. She knows all about fevers, and pleurisies, and broken bones. She has been doctoring all her life, spreading plasters, and pouring out bitter drops, and shaking up hot pillows and contriving things to tempt a poor appetite.
Doctors Abernethy, Rush, Hosack and Harvey were great doctors, but the greatest doctor the world ever saw was a Christian mother. Dear me I Do we not remember her about the room, when we were sick in our boyhood? Was there any one who could so touch a sore without hurting it? And when she lifted her spectacles against her wrinkled forehead, so she could look closer at the wound, it was three-fourths healed.
And when the Lord took her home, although you may have been men and women thirty, forty, fifty years of age, you lay on the coffin-lid and sobbed as though you were only five or ten years of age. O man, praise God, if, instead of looking back to one of those berouged and bespangled old people, fixed up of the devil to look young, you have in your memory the picture of an honest, sympathetic, kind, self-sacrificing, Christ-like mother.—TALMAGE.
