What is the finest and highest love that we know?  There are many different sorts and degrees of love revealed in man’s relation with his fellow:  conjugal, the love between husband and wife; paternal, the love of a father for his child; maternal, the mother’s love for her child; filial, the love of children for father and mother; fraternal, or brotherly, meaning really the love of children of the same parents for each other, both brothers and sisters—­the same word is used for love between friends where there is no tie of blood; and patriotic, or love for one’s country.  And under that last word may be loosely grouped the love that one may have for any special object, to which he may devote his life, outside of personal relationships, such as music or any profession or occupation.

This is putting them in their logical order.  Though in our experience we know the father-and mother-love for ourselves first; and then in turn the 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 very life.  If need be, she sacrifices everything in life, and then sacrifices life itself, going out into the darkness of death that her child may come into fulness and sweetness of life.  This is the mother spirit, giving one’s very self to bring life to another.

The mother gives her very life-blood that the new life may come.  And, if need be, will gladly give her life out to the death that the new life may come into life.  And yet more, she gives her life out daily and yearly, throughout its length, that so the full strength and fragrance of life may come in her child’s life.