humanity—“As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you."

Maternal love and tenderness (to dwell for a little with greater amplitude on the figure then cursorily referred to) is the strongest and most enduring of instincts. It holds potent sway even in the brute creation, and among the lower tribes of animated being. We see it exemplified in the timid bird hovering with wailing cry over the threatened or despoiled nest, and, despite of its feebleness and weakness, ready to give battle to the invader. We see it in the familiar scriptural emblem of the hen gathering her brood of chickens under her wings in threatening storm, or in the hour of danger. We see it in the bolder watch the mother of the eaglets keeps over her young in the eyry on cliff or mountain-side, as she disputes, with ruffled plumage, the assault of the plunderer. We see it in the proverbial fierceness of the "bear robbed of her whelps," or in the maddened roar of the lioness bereaved of her cubs,

as she lashes her sides with her tail, and makes mountain and forest "ring with the proclamation of her wrongs."

But it is the mother and her infant babe (the human parent) in whom this deep-seated instinct has its highest, truest illustration. Who can love, who can comfort, like a mother? Perhaps, too, the most striking and most beautiful exemplification of that comfort is, not where cradles are rocked in lordly halls or under gilded ceilings (though the crowned and queenly mother can also hold her vigils of devotion at the sick-couch of her child); but the strength of the God-given affection is best attested in the case of those, who, from bitter penury and dire misfortune (it may be crime), are dead to other nobler and finer feelings and aspirations. The shivering beggar in her rags, asking a pittance from door to door, has her warmest covering reserved for the little sufferer she presses to her bosom, and interludes her Own cheerless alm-song with some tender

lullaby of love and comfort addressed to the tiny burden that is dearer to her than her own life. And as maternal tenderness belongs to no rank or class, so neither does it belong to any age. The Hebrew mother of the olden time and the British mother, of the present, share the same solicitude for their offspring. You may recall one among other Old Testament examples.-A little child in a harvest-field of Northern Palestine, as he gambolled among the reapers, was smitten all in a moment by a sunstroke. The cry of distress is first uttered in his father's ear,-"My head! my head!" "Carry him to his mother," was the instant direction. Then follows the tender delineation when that injunction is obeyed; we see him seated on his mother's knee, fondled and caressed during hours of anxious suspense, till at last he drooped, a withered flower, on her bosom (2 Kings iv. 18-20). Aye, and doubtless in her case, as in thousand thousand similar since her sad day of blighted hopes, the

depths of a mother's affection, was only gauged when the cradle was emptied, the face despoiled of its dimples, and the ringing laugh silenced. A mother's love! mother's comforts! Who cannot tell of them? Were I to describe the experiences of all whose eyes trace these lines, what a picture-gallery would be formed! Go back to your earliest dreams of infancy in the day-dawn of memory; you can almost recall touch for touch in the portrait of that Shunamite we have just described; when the little sick-couch was anxiously watched and night-rest willingly surrendered, for days, it may be weeks, together, in order that no hand but her own might moisten the fevered lips, bathe the throbbing temples, and smooth the pillow. Or that dark night when the winds. were wrestling outside with the branches, as if the spirits of the air had broken loose in wild carnival; or when the thunderstorm was lowering over the blackened heavens; what was it that dispelled your infant fears and exorcised

the demons of the storm? What but the comforting tones of a mother's voice, and the firm grasp of a mother's hand. Or a stage more advanced when infancy and childhood were merging into youth-when, a young learner at school, you were weeping despairingly over the hard unmastered task, you remember how the words of heart-cheer from a mother's lips chased these tears away, or lulled you soothingly to sleep, in happy forgetfulness of your mental troubles and disquietude. Or more memorable still you may recall the incipient fault, the fit of passion, the petty misappropriation, the departure from the truth, the artful concealment : then the discovery, and the bitter anguish of the young and sensitive conscience. But you remember, too, whose words, first of wise reproof and then of generous forgiveness, brought back the sunshine to life's young morning; who "kissed the offence into everlasting forgetfulness." Or a stage yet further still: when you first set out from under the parental roof-tree on