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Readers of such writers as Theodore Parker, Frances Power Cobbe, and Chunder Sen must often have been struck with the frequency with which these theists address invocations or prayers to God as the Father and Mother of our spirits. Why should they not? There are surely as valid reasons for our thinking and speaking of God as our Perfect Mother as there are for claiming Him as the Perfect Father of us all.

1. Even if there were no hint or smile to this effect in the Scriptures we should still find it necessary to predicate it of God in order to perfect our conceptions of Him. What these conceptions are will best be understood by a disclosure of their basis. To our thinking, the ultimate source of our knowledge of God is the intuitions of the human heart. The instincts, the qualities, the affections in human nature (though these are at a very great remove from those in God) are the truest indications and interpretations to us of what God is; if the revelation recorded in the Bible be the light (as it undoubtedly is), these things in us are the eye to which that light appeals and by which we see; in fact, if we cannot argue from our own spiritual natures up to God's, then, all metaphysical reasoning and the Christian Scriptures notwithstanding, we have no reliable knowledge of God, faith is presumptuous, worship delusive, and the ground of personal responsibility crumbles away- from under our feet. Further, a philosophical interpretation of the person of the Christ, as well as the Scriptural declaration that man is made in the image of God, warrants the assertion that in a very true sense one of the worthiest conceptions of the Divine nature is that of a fully- developed, completely perfected, human nature. On this ground we believe we are justified in regarding God as our Father; or, to put conversely what this implies, we do right in assuming the fatherly elements in men to be the best index or guarantee of what God is. But whilst the Fatherhood of God is the perfection of our human nature, so far as man is concerned, it is not the crown of our humanity in its totality, that is to say, so far as human nature includes womanhood as well as manhood. God, in the very nature of the case, must gather up in Himself all the essential qualities of the mother no less than of the father. That this is so, is in a measure evidenced by the facts of our human experience. Take, for example, the evidence deducible from the case of a family where the children have been deprived of either parent, say the mother; in this instance, not only do the boys lose the beneficial effect of the softening and refining atmosphere of their mothers presence, but the girls also, however wise and fond their father may be, become prudish and unnaturally grave. In like manner, if the children are left fatherless, both sons and daughters suffer from the loss of their father's sobering, restraining influence, while the daughters especially miss the strengthening force derivable from acquaintance with his life and character. Yes, that child only is rightly trained and fully educated who has had the good fortune to know both the gentler sway of a mother's and the severer rule of a father's nature. We see, then, that in actual life only that parentage is normally complete which is the blending of the two complementing sides, the fatherly and the motherly. And since of necessity the ideal in heaven cannot be less perfect than the actual on earth, and since, moreover, God is the source whence all the phases of our humanity have sprung, we may reverently address God in our prayers as being both the Perfect Father and Mother in whom we confide.

2. Nor is this idea of the Divine Motherhood as unserviceable as at first sight it may seem. It may be urged as affording one practical way of escape from the beautiful but blinding web, so to say, which the thoughts of many are busily weaving. It not unfrequently occurs that men, whose scientific tastes or pursuits change rather than destroy their hold on religion, find their thoughts of nature, life, and God taking a purely pantheistic colouring. To highly imaginative minds, to devout poetic temperaments, this habit of deifying everything is not a little fascinating. If God be thought of as He who is nature itself, then the more sensuous sides of our being will be appealed to and quickened, we grant, as will our intellectual needs in many respects be met and fostered. But the deep hunger and thirst of our more human natures will be unappeased, the more spiritual and practical cravings of our personal life will be slighted and wronged. For how little will such a pantheistic faith, beautiful as it is, and true in part though it be, serve and console the heart when it is beset with agonizing doubt or disheartened by the strength and shame of its sin, or well-nigh crushed by a fatalistic sense of the hard, merciless rule of the inevitable! Nature in some of her moods is anything but pitiful. Besides, what does a religion of this kind avail for those who have not been endowed with a lively imagination, or with poetic insight, or with mental vigour; what will or can it mean to those whose ideas and impressions of life are chiefly toned and tempered by poverty or pain or thankless toil, or misery or crime? With such an abstract God as this, we shall feel ourselves before long like to one wearied, oppressed with all the recherche elegance of a palace, and yearning for the real and simple comfort of a home. See now the remedy the truth under discussion affords. Let it be granted that God is the stun total of all the beauty and order, and music and life of the universe, but then surely He is more than this. He is the source and crown of all the human affections that have scattered themselves like so many sun's rays throughout the fatherhoods and motherhoods, and childhoods and friendships of the world. These intensely real elements in our,, experience must have a living background m" God from whom all things issue. He that made the ear, shall He not hear; He that made the eye shall He not see J" and shall not He who bestowed on us so personal and potent a divinity as our mother, "the holiest thing on earth," be Himself equally personal and motherly?

(J. T. Stannard.)

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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."