---

There are old lessons of the love of God we may learn in a fresh light as we interpret them through the thought of the Motherhood of God.

1. The intensity of the Divine self-sacrifice grows keener through it. All love gives itself, but its climax of self-renunciation is motherhood.

2. The sense of the inalienableness of the Divine love is deepened also by the thought of the Motherhood of God. Does a mother's love ever die? When every other love expires, it lives its secret life. Its patience is. infinite. A mother may forget. Her motherhood may prove false. But it is not likely. It is the most unnatural thing in nature. It is as if the sun should rise in the west, and set in the east. A lioness will fight to the death for her whelps, and the she-bear for her cubs. It is the first and last instinct creation knows. But let nature have denied herself, let her have given the lie to her primal instincts, let the stars have gone backward in their courses, and all the settled order of the universe have returned to chaos, yet even then, saith the Lord, will I not forget thee

3. Possibly also the Divine yearning over the wayward and prodigal may find a fresh setting in the idea of the Motherhood of God. When a father's love does not easily forgive, because his sense of justice and order and true discipline in the family, of which he is the responsible governor, are hindrances, the mother's love deviseth prevailing persuasions, and intercedes with tears. And in unknown depths of a common love of the prodigal the justice and the mercy somehow meet and are reconciled. Evangelical theologians arc ever conscious of two elements in the character of God, whose nature and whose name is Love. The law of righteousness and the ministry of mercy are always present. And the problem of their reconciliation is the problem so much profound and noble thought has striven to solve in the doctrine of atonement. They arc both true. The Lord our God is one God; but He is Father-God and Mother-God. We wonder at times whether the prodigal son of our Lord's parable had a mother. It is not difficult to suggest reasons why, in an Oriental country, where the position of woman is so different from her place in our own, the father's love should wisely be Christ's type of the Divine. But there is a fragment of further meaning hidden in the story for these who remember that the prodigal may not have been motherless. Certain it is that, if his father climbed to the house-top to gaze expectant in the direction of the far country, his mother crept into her chamber alone to pray. As the father commands, "Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him," the mother's eyes are homes of silent tears. And who shall say that the rejoicing of the home-coming was not tenderer in the mother's heart, and that tender joy the last balm of healing to the prodigal son?

(Ibid.)

---

---

KJV: As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you; and ye shall be comforted in Jerusalem.

WEB: As one whom his mother comforts, so will I comfort you; and you will be comforted in Jerusalem."