others, so far as they come to us, until we complete the circle and reach
the climax of father-and mother-love in ourselves going out to another.



Mother-love.


Now of these sorts and degrees which is the highest and finest? Well, your
answer to that question will depend entirely on your own experience; as
every answer and every thought we have of everything does. All children
have mothers, or have had, but thousands of children don't know a mother's
love.

I was speaking one time in New York City about the conception, of which
the Bible is so full, that God is a mother. And the English evangelist
Gypsy Smith, who lost his mother when very young, but who had an unusually
devoted father, said with charming simplicity that he could not just see
how God could be called a mother, but he knew He was a father. And then he
went on to speak very winsomely of God as a father.

Many times love is not born in the heart at all, until there comes into
the life some one clear outside of one's own kin. Many a woman never knows
love until it is awakened in her heart by him who henceforth is to be a
part of herself.

But the common answer, that most people everywhere give to that question,
is that a mother's love is the greatest human love we know. And if you
press them to tell why they think so, this stands out oftenest and
strongest--that it is because she gives so much of herself. She gives her