Said Mr. Toots, upon the occasion of the birth of his fourth daughter--“The oftener we can repeat that extraordinary woman the better!” Everybody laughs at the proud husband’s praise of his spouse, but--ask your heart, loving mother, if there is not a strange fullness of joy in watching the reproduction of your traits, physical, mental, and moral, in your child? How many times a day does she bring back some half-forgotten scene of your own childhood? How frequently, at the expression of her fancies, or opinions, or desires, do you say, with a smile, a sigh--perchance a tear--“I felt, or thought, or longed the same at her years; it is her inheritance?” Is there not a joy yet greater, an inexpressible swelling of love and pride, as you see in the lineaments and gesture of your boy, the faithful portraiture of one dearer to you than your own soul? I am not talking now to those who have felt nothing of all this; from whom the knowledge of these sacred mysteries has been withheld, and who are incapable, from the barrenness and shallowness of their own spiritual natures, of ever entering fully into them. It is useless to say to these that motherhood is a holy thing, and offspring the boon of Heaven; that, amidst the wild clamor of woman’s rights and woman’s sphere, she best enacts the rôle appointed her by the wise Parent of all, does most to elevate her race, who rears strong, good men, and gentle, noble daughters to serve God and the generation to come. To the gross, all things are gross, and these truths are pearls, too clear in their purity to be trampled by such. I appeal to mothers--to brave, pious women who fear God and love their husbands--but who have yet never arisen to the perfect realization of the grandeur of the work assigned them; never thought of themselves as the architects of the nation’s fortunes, the sculptors, whose fair or foul handiwork is to outlast their age, to outlive Time, to remain through all Eternity. I would awaken those whom the prejudices of education or the plausible sophistries of the modern fashionable school have blinded to the deep significance of those words--“Behold, children are an heritage from the Lord, and the fruit of the womb is His reward!” Women! sisters! be assured there is something tearfully and radically wrong in a system that teaches us to despise or refuse our rightful share in our Father’s riches! Look to it, lest haply ye be found to sin against God! My second assertion is that it is a _right of babies to have mothers_.