Sorrowing mothers and their consolation.
I. THE GRIEFS OF BEREAVED MOTHERS. There is an innumerable company of women who have seen the children die in whom they themselves had given birth, and Rachel is their great representative. She stands before us here as the mother of a nation; for surely it only spoils a grand poetical idea to attach her to some tribes rather than others. She sees the nation which sprang from her husband Jacob going from the land of promise into captivity, and straightway she reckons it as a dead nation. Bear in mind distinctly that the mourning is not over dead individuals, but over a dead nation. The individuals went on living, but the nation in its pride and privilege was gone. So one might think of some representative spirit bewailing dead Greece and dead Rome. The figure, moreover, derives its strength from what must have been very frequent in the land of Israel, as in every land before or since, namely, the sad sight presented by a mother weeping over her dead child. The mother's sorrow is unique; its elements can only be imperfectly apprehended by others. The object of so much hope, solicitude, and pleasure is gone. The proper order of things is reversed. The mother should see the child grow to manhood or womanhood, and then go first into the unseen world. Death, coming in this way, seems to furnish a plausible ground of complaint, and if anything can be said to lessen the mystery and the sorrow and make hope rise in the heart, it should be said.
II. CONSOLATION IN SUCH TIME OF GRIEF. The real Rachel needed no such consolation. But bereaved mothers both need it and can have it. They have worked for something else than death and the breaking off of their purposes, and their work shall not be in vain. Death is a great deceiver in making his power seem greater than it is. When children are taken from this world into the next, opportunities are not lost, they are only changed. God will assuredly not allow the highest joys belonging to human nature to suffer from a cause so purely external as the duration of temporal existence. When Herod slew the children at Bethlehem, this prophecy had a sort of fulfilment, and surely so far as it was fulfilled it was fulfilled altogether. To every, one of those weeping mothers it might have been said, "Refrain thy voice from weeping and thine eyes from tears." The weeping and the tears are natural enough, but after all they have no sufficient ground in reason. As a general rule, life must be taken with all its risks and casualties, seeing that risk and casualty, as we call them, are after all, according to a law. Sometimes there are extraordinary preservations of infant life, and when some life so delivered has afterwards unfolded into eminence and usefulness, there is a talk of something specially providential in the preservation. Some such preserved lives, however, turn out a great curse, and then where is the providence. The great thing every mother should seek is such faithfulness, such wisdom, such right dealing in all ways as will enable her to be a true mother to her children, however long they live. Then, whatever happens, there is the certainty that her work will be rewarded. The work of individual obedience can never come to anything but reward in the end. The mischief is that very often we want the reward to come in our way and not in God's.—Y.