The Pulpit Speaks: May 10, 1958

An article written by my father, the Rev. C. Thomas Paige, as it appeared in the Tri-State Defender on the date shown.

A bleeding, persecuted Jesus hung on a cross. Suddenly, His thoughts turned to His mother and He cried out, “Son, behold thy mother!”

Today all of us find ourselves suddenly thinking in the direction of mother. No one influence has had such a force on the building of man as that of a mother.

A wise man said sometime ago, “As go the woman, so goes the generation.” The truth of this statement cannot be denied. But by the same token of thinking, we could easily say, “As go the mothers, so go the offspring.” No river rises above its source. No man rises above his mother. The things that make most impressions upon the young mid in its formative stage are the things that stay with the child throughout his life.

The mother in the home is the great mother of the man or the woman who comes out of that home. All of the virtues that are later evidenced in the child are the virtues to which he has been exposed in his early days.

Whether we accept it or not, all of the vices that are evidenced in the child are the vices that he has witnessed in his early childhood. The man who is able to rise up to the tasks of his day and time is the man who has seen his mother do just that when the flour barrel has gotten low or the meat runs out. The real mother is able to substitute something else and go on. The weak mother stands around and gripes because she does not have this or that and, therefore, she is not able to prepare as she would like to. In later years, when her child marries or when the burdens of life are placed upon him, he goes off in some corner and cries.

Our world today is filled with too many people who are little more than grown cry babies who, in the hour of strain and stress, go off to some corner and cry when adversities come into their lives. This is no time for cry babies! The child of today must be equipped with those forces that will enable him to stand up with life “what ‘e’r betides.”

The courageous mother begets a courageous child. The considerate mother begets a considerate child. The forgiving mother begets a forgiving child. On and on we could go, but let me say that the same way a mother with those virtues beget children of that same nature, the opposite is equally true. How unfortunate it is that a child will grow up thinking that the world moves around him and when things do not go his way, he takes his ball and goes home. How unfortunate it is that some people are so self-centered that they think that “without me, there would be no world.”

Yet we have just these kind of people in our midst. The person who really makes a contribution to our word is that person who has been so reared that he feels that the games are more important than whether he plays first, quarterback, or does not play at all. Yet unfortunately, some of us have been brought up in homes where we feel that we are the whole show, and when the time comes that we cannot have our way, we quit.

The real mother is one who looks ahead and sees what lies in store for her son or daughter, and tries to mold his or her life to fit the overall picture. Whatever our present plight, we owe it to a mother who went down to death’s very door itself and cuddled us and cared for us when we were not able to care for ourselves and when no one else in particular really did care. Whatever attitudes some of us may now have concerning our new-fangled motherhood, many of us owe our present status to a mother who was unlettered academically but who had come to grips with those vital forces in life that were injected into us to the extent that we are able to build thereon.

Many of us might become overzealous at times and look back over our shoulders with pride and say to ourselves, “Look what I have done!” But in the final analysis, we have done nothing. As this man hung on the cross, no doubt His mind went back, and even in this hour of triumph, He could look up at motherhood with a sense of pride and cry out, “Behold thy mother.”

It was a mother who faced adversities in all of its angry phases that to Him was a stimulus, enabled Him to face the cross. It was a mother who enabled Him to see His enemies though the eyes of forgiveness and eventually give up the ghost with malice toward none.