188 BOYS OF THE BIBLE.

Not patriots and poets alone, but all good men and
true are ever ready to declare that the debt of gratitude
they owe their mother is high as heaven, deeper than the
grave and as lasting as the years of life.

A mother’s love is born with the first breath of the
life she gives, and when the need of her child is the sorest,
then is her love the deepest and strongest. When the tyrant
of Egypt decreed the death of all the young Hebrew boys,
then the Hebrew mothers rose to the occasion and hid their
boys from danger. We may be very sure that Jochebed
was not the only mother who sheltered her smiling Moses
from the threatened doom. When Herod sent forth his
cruel edict for the slaughter of the innocents, we hear noth-
ing of the men, the fathers who should have defended their
children with their lives; but we hear the wail of the broken-
hearted mothers: ‘Then was fulfilled that which was
spoken by Jeremiah the prophet, saying: In Rama _ there
was a voice heard, lamentation and weeping and great
mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and would not
be comforted because they are not.” The day of the child’s
danger is the day when the mother’s love grows strong.
And if the grave should close over son or daughter, child
or youth; then the mother’s love blossoms into more sacred
beauty. All the world over, there are thousands of mothers
who having reared their children only to see them fade
from their vision, have now only the melancholy joy of
keeping, like Rizpah of old, sad vigil by the graves of
their dead. Many mothers who are rich chiefly in graves,
have no deeper joy in life than to pay constant visits to the
graves of their departed, to trim the cypress and keep the
myrtle green. Our annual Decoration Day is a great day
for the Rizpahs of this later age; then all over the land from