ality. He
knew what it meant--infinite forgiveness, a lifelong, yearning
tenderness, a Something that suffereth long and is kind. This he
preached for fifty years, and he preached little else. Lyman Beecher
proclaimed the justice of God; Henry Ward Beecher told of His love.
Lyman Beecher was a logician, but Henry Ward was a lover. There is a
task on hand for the man who attempts to prove that Nature is kind, or
that God is love. Perhaps man himself, with all his imperfections, gives
us the best example of love that the universe has to offer. In preaching
the love of God, Henry Ward Beecher revealed his own; for oratory, like
literature, is only a confession.

"My first mother is always pleading for me--she reaches out her arms to
me--her delicate, long, tapering fingers stroke my hair--I hear her
voice, gentle and low!" Do you say this is the language of o'erwrought
emotion? I say to you it is simply the language of love. This mother,
dead and turned to dust, who passed out when the boy was scarce three
years old, stood to him for the ideal. Love, anyway, is a matter of the
imagination, and he who can not imagine can not love, and love is from
within. The lover clothes the beloved in the garments of his fancy, and
woe to him if he ever loses the power to imagine.

Have you not often noticed how the man or woman whose mother died before
a time that the child could recall, and whose memory clusters around a
faded picture and a lock of hair--how this person is thrice blessed in
that the ideal is always a shelter when the real palls? Love is a refuge
and a defense. The Law of Compensation is kind: Lincoln lived, until the
day of his death, bathed in the love of Nancy Hanks, that mother, worn,
yellow and sad, who gave him birth, and yet whom he had never known. No
child ever really lost its mother--nothing is ever lost. Men are really
only grown-up children, and the longing to be mothered is not effaced by
the passing years. The type is well shown in the life of Meissonier,
whose mother died in his childhood, but she was near him to the last. In
his journal he wrote this: "It is the morning of my seventieth birthday.
What a long time to look back upon! This morning, at the hour my mother
gave me birth, I wished my first thoughts to be of her. Dear Mother, how
often have the tears risen at the remembrance of you! It was your
absence--my longing for you--that made you so dear to me. The love of my
heart goes out to you! Do yo