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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadQuiet Talks by Samuel Dickey: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks on Home Ideals: 49. Teaching Life's Language to Baby Lips.
TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks on Home Ideals (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 49. Teaching Life's Language to Baby Lips.
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Teaching Life's Language to Baby Lips.
Motherhood's duties cannot be entrusted to other hands. It is a sad breach of life's most sacred trust when that is done. There are emergencies, of course, when the mother's lack of strength makes help grateful, and when other hands must help. And there are women who have never borne children who are yet mothers of the best sort in the heart and head and hand. But such transferring of the trust to other hands must always be reckoned the exceptional thing, done only under stress of storm. The mother may not give into other hands the moulding of that precious life, and the true mother won't, save when she must. No one can minister to child needs as the mother.
"A little wound, a little ache,
A little blistered thumb to take
With touch of love and make it well—
These things require a mother's spell.
Ah, sweet the progress of the skill
That science brings unto the ill.
Vast range of methods new and fine;
But when our little ones repine,
The mother is the very best
Of doctors into service prest.
"Sunshine and air and mother's spell
Of helping little lads get well,
And helping little lassies, too—
Here are three remedies that do
So much more, often, than the grave,
Skilled hands that try so hard to save.
For Doctor Mother, don't you know,
Gives something more than skill—gives so
Much of herself; gives, oh, so much
Of love's sweet alchemy of touch!
"Upon a little wardroom bed
A little curl-encircled head,
A little slender hand and pale,
A little lonesome, homesick wail,
Loved nursing best of skill and care,
But, oh, behold the wonder there
When Doctor Mother, bearing sun
From where the wilding roses run,
Leans down, with hungering love and kiss—
There is no medicine like this!
"In little child-heart's hour of woe,
Pain, ache or life-wound's throb and throe,
The Doctor Mother knows so well
The weaving of love's wonder-spell—
Just what the little heart requires,
Just how to cool the fever fires;
lust how much tenderness and cheer
Will calm the little doubt and fear,
How much of tenderness will ease—
Alone she knows such arts as these!" (Baltimore Sun.)
The newspapers a few years ago had a bit from one of the North-western States of more than passing interest. A mother was disturbed on finding that her little child couldn't talk. He would make strange sounds, but couldn't talk even baby talk. She consulted her physician, wondering if the vocal organs were defective. He was a man of Finnish birth. A very brief examination disclosed the startling fact that this American woman's child was talking Finnish, and had been scolding his mother for not talking to him. The nurse-maid, into whose keeping the child had been almost wholly given, was a Finnish woman, and naturally talked in her mother-tongue the endearing baby talk dear to all woman hearts.
The discovery revealed at once who was moulding and mothering the child. The story is both amusing and pathetic. It was not a serious thing that the child should be taught some other language than the mother's. But it becomes a very serious thing when baby lips and child lips, the growing boys' and girls' lips are allowed to learn the language of life from any but mother and father lips. Many a man has gotten his moral grammar horribly tangled because it wasn't learned from the right lips.