God our father,--bound even to the most erring of His children by a kinship that misdoing cannot break (for if the human tie be indissoluble, shall the divine be less so?); father,--by a tie so intimate that to this day the stalwart Afghan, prostrating in the mosque, says "Thee" and "Thou" to the God of Hosts, as might an infant on its father's knee! In the Aryan home, woman stands supreme. As wife in the West,--lady and queen of her husband--as mother in the East,--a goddess Jesus Himself--to those who kneel before no Madonna in the Vatican--sounds this note of the Nay, He is conscious of this element in His own nature. Once at least He speaks of it. In that sublime moment when He, the young Leader of the armies of the future, stands on the sunlit mountains, and looking down upon the city of His race sees the dark shadow of destiny wrapping it about, in that moment when the Patriot forgets, in a sob of human anguish, that He is Master and Redeemer, in that moment He becomes all motherhood. "O Jerusalem! Jerusalem! Thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee,--how often would I have gathered thy children together, like as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!"
