the recognition of that outlasting secret hope and love, of which the Gospel writer told in the simple words: "Now there stood by the cross of Jesus his mother," and faith in which was strong in the Mesopotamians of old, who prayed to the goddess Istar, "May thy heart be appeased as the heart of a mother who has borne children." The world is at its best when the last, holiest appeal is _ad matrem_. Professor O.T. Mason has eloquently stated the debt of the world's religions to motherhood (112. 12):--"The mother-goddess of all peoples, culminating in the apotheosis of the Virgin Mary, is an idea either originated by women, or devised to satisfy their spiritual cravings. So we may go through the pantheons of all peoples, finding counterparts of Rhea, mother-earth, goddess of fertility; Hera, queen of harvests, feeder of mankind; Hestia, goddess of the hearth and home, of families and states, giving life and warmth; Aphrodite, the beautiful, patron of romantic love and personal charms; Hera, sovereign lady, divine caciquess, embodiment of queenly dignity; Pallas Athene, ideal image of that central inspiring force that we learn at our mother's knee, and that shone in eternal splendour; Isis, the goddess of widowhood, sending forth her son Horus, to avenge the death of his father, Osiris; as moon-goddess, keeping alive the light until the sun rises again to bless the world." _The All-Mother._ In Polynesian mythology we find, dwelling in the lowest depths of Avaiki (the interior of the universe), the "Great Mother,"--the originator of all things, _Vari-ma-te-takere_, "the very beginning,"--and her pet child, Tu-metua, "Stick by the parent," her last offspring, inseparable from her. All of her children were born of pieces of flesh which she plucked off her own body; the first-born was the man-fish Vatea, "father of gods and men," whose one eye is the sun, the other the moon; the fifth child was Raka, to whom his mother gave the winds in a basket, and "the children of Raka are the numerous winds and storms which distress mankind. To each child is allotted a hole at the edge of the horizon, through which he blows at pleasure." In the songs the gods are termed "the children of Vatea," and the ocean is sometimes called "the sea of Vatea." Mr. Gill tells us that "the Great Mother approximates nearest to the dignity of creator"; and, curiously enough, the word _Vari_, "beginning," signifies, on the island of Rarotonga, "mud," showing that "these people imagined that once the world was a 'chaos of mud,' out of which some mighty unseen agent, whom they called _Vari_, evolved the present order of things" (458. 3, 21). Another "All-Mother" is she of whom our own poets have sung, "Nature," the source and sustainer of all. _Mother-Nature_.