The loss out of our religion of all those ideas which may be classed as the doctrine of the motherhood of God has been attended with evils innumerable. The Church of Rome, in obedience to a vehement popular instinct, has sought to make up for the defect by Mariolatry. The orthodox Protestant Churches, by sternly adhering to their masculine Trinity, have indeed preserved the awe and moral reverence which the Divine Kingship and Fatherhood demand, and which the paganism of virgin worship has obliterated. But how much have they not lost by excluding those sentiments which can only be given to One in whom we recognize not only justice, holiness, and beneficence, but also tenderness, sympathy, love? The truth is we are so constituted that great benefits received,--if we think of them as bestowed merely because it is right and good to give them, and not from love for ourselves,--so far from awakening in us spontaneous emotions of gratitude, have rather an opposite tendency, and seem to lay on us an obligation to be grateful, which is a sort of burden, and from which all minds save the most generous have a proclivity to escape. To hundreds of us, large donations from just and well-meaning but unaffectionate fathers have failed to waken the smallest throb of genuine gratefulness; while some mere trifle given by a loving mother--a flower from a well-remembered rose-tree, a scrap of her needlework--has filled our eyes with tears. In excluding, then, in a great degree from view that which I may presume to call the maternal side of religion, the Churches, so far as they have done it, have dropped the golden chain whereby human hearts may be drawn, and have kept in their hands the iron one which can only control the reason and the conscience. Is it possible to estimate the amount of loss to religion which this signifies, or how many thousands of souls might have been won by _love_ to a life of piety and holiness who have refused to obey the bit and bridle of sterner motives, and have wandered off and been lost in the wilderness of practical atheism?