In an article entitled "Mothers are the True Builders of Nations," Madison C. Peters says:

      "Our homes have made America peerless among the nations. Any encyclopedia of American biography will prove that our most illustrious statesmen, our most distinguished scientists, our most eloquent preachers, our merchant princes, and our great benefactors came from the humble families where the mothers ruled not as queens of fashion, but where the nursery for the family was a nursery for the church, where the first lispings of childhood were the accents of prayer and the first thoughts of the heart were the thoughts of God.

      "The Jews are universally admired for the affections which adorn their domestic life. The foundation of the Jewish faith was laid in the sanctity of domestic affection and purity. The Bible Jew never made the mistake of separating the church and the home. His piety nestled beneath the shelter of two truths--one was the dwelling where he lived with his wife and children in some corner of the Holy Land and in the fear of his father's God.

      "According to the Jewish imagination the divine presence was the atmosphere of that house and gave it an indescribable beauty. His wife was a vine that God's hand had planted and his children as olive trees around the table. We need not wonder that this race has given to the world a greater number of great men than any other race in proportion to their numbers.

      "The German Empire is great because German homes [200] are good, because the German mothers are industrious, economical, honest, and virtuous.

      "Great Britain is great because it has model homes, because British mothers are intelligent and pious. In the special display of the Victorian jubilee nothing was so beautiful or so glorious as the Queen kneeling at the altar, taking communion, throwing her arms around her children and grandchildren as they came one after another to kneel at her side, kissing and crying over them like a child.

      "She never rose so high in her royalty as when she knelt, a simple mother, crying over her children at the altar of God."

      There is in all the possible range of human positions none so great, so reverend, so high, so responsible, so calculated to call forth the best and truest the human heart affords, as the state of motherhood. If, as some pessimistically claim, reality is seldom found in the world of human relationships and affections, it is surely found there, in the pure truth and faithfulness of the mother's love. If "all the world loves a lover," it is yet more certain that every man who is worthy of the name bows to do honor to motherhood and to give tribute to the woman that faithfully fills such holy place. And well may he. It is a life of labor and suffering and heavy responsibility and sacrifice and self-forgetful toil. Most men owe their best to their mothers, and some owe her everything. And none will disagree when we say that the grandest thing God has left us in this poor world, the one nearest to perfection, the one that best affords an example of God's perfect love and tenderness, is bound up in the word "mother."

      On the other hand, the perverting of this highest of all callings is correspondingly evil and abhorrent. "The corruption of the best is the worst corruption." The [201] selfish, damnable efforts on the part of some to avoid the sufferings and toil and responsibilities of motherhood; the infamous means resorted to, to avoid the God-decreed issue of marital relationship; the unknown murders--whose retribution is all the more fearful and certain because they escape the jurisdiction of human courts of justice; murders all the more selfish because practiced upon lives just budding into existence, entirely helpless and defenseless, committed to the tenderest care of the human beings to whom they were intrusted of the Almighty God; none the less condemnable because sometimes effected by the secret aid of some physician (not all, thank God, nor the majority, will prostitute their skill thus)--this must be a spectacle to make hell shudder. And it is fearfully prevalent, and not in the "world" alone, either. What will the great Judge say? Custom may harden the minds of people until they have no conscience in such matters. But the question is not, "What do men think of such things?" but, "What will God say to that?"

      This is a matter where every man and every woman is left peculiarly alone with his own conscience and his God. But their happiness here and their eternal welfare, the life and well-being of the community and the nation and the race, depend greatly on this very point. It is a delicate matter; yet parents should instill right principles concerning it into their children, teachers should endeavor to impress it upon pupils, and preachers must condemn the secret crimes and hold forth God's will, and the ideal of true, pure, faithful motherhood, and of homes that are blessed of God.

[TAG 200-202]