Article May 3, 1924 Issue

The Motherhood of God

ROBERT HARVEY TEEPLE

There are few places on earth which appear more forlorn than a home from which the mother has been taken away. Let the father be ever so loving, devoted, and self-sacrificing, what a sense of incompleteness there is about a home from which motherhood, with its brooding tenderness and understanding care, is absent!

When Jesus yearned over Jerusalem, he referred to the sense of motherhood: "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, ... how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings!" Motherhood has always been an absorbing theme for the poet, the artist, and the sculptor. A certain writer has exclaimed, "If I could mother the world, I could save the world."

Now when one contemplates the nature of God in the light of the foregoing, is it not apparent, at the very outset, that any concept of the divine nature which does not include the qualities of motherhood falls far short of being complete? It is true that in the Scriptures Deity is not directly referred to as Mother. Jesus always spoke of God as Father. For these reasons, the belief that the divine nature includes fatherhood only has been so fixed in the thought of Christendom that, apart from the revelation of Christian Science, little or no intelligent consideration seems to have been given to the subject. The writer well recalls the shock he received when he first read in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy that God is Mother as well as Father. Such teaching, at the time, seemed positively sacrilegious to his uninstructed thought.

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