the
most important need of its career was guaranteed. "An ounce of mother,"
says the Spanish proverb, "is worth a pound of clergy." Jean Paul says
that in life every successive influence affects us less and less, so
that the circumnavigator of the globe is less influenced by all the
nations he has seen than by his nurse. Well may the child imbibe that
reverence for motherhood which is the first need of man. Where woman is
most a slave, she is at least sacred to her son. The Turkish Sultan
must prostrate himself at the door of his mother's apartments, and were
he known to have insulted her, it would make his throne tremble. Among
the savage African Touaricks, if two parents disagree, it is to the
mother that the child's obedience belongs. Over the greater part of the
earth's surface, the foremost figures in all temples are the Mother and
Child. Christian and Buddhist nations, numbering together two thirds of
the world's population, unite in this worship. Into the secrets of the
ritual that baby in the window had already received initiation.

And how much spiritual influence may in turn have gone forth from that
little one! The coarsest father gains a new impulse to labor from the
moment of his baby's birth; he scarcely sees it when awake, and yet it
is with him all the time. Every stroke he strikes is for his child. New
social aims, new moral motives, come vaguely up to him. The London
costermonger told Mayhew that he thought every man would like his son
or daughter to have a better start in the world than his own. After
all, there is no tonic like the affections. Philosophers express wonder
that the divine laws should give to some young girl, almost a child,
the custody of an immortal soul. But what instruction the baby brings
to the mother! She learns patience, self-control, endurance; her very
arm grows strong, so that she can hold the dear burden longer than the
father can. She learns to understand character, too, by dealing with
it. "In training my first children," said a wise mother to me, "I
thought that all were born just the same, and that I was wholly
responsible for what they should become. I learned by degrees that each
had a temperament of its own, which I must study before I could teach
it." And thus, as the little ones grow older, their dawning instincts
guide those of the parents; their questions suggest new answers, and to
have loved them is a liberal education.

For the height of heights is love. The