"Joy of my heart! O let me pay To thee thine own sweet month of May.
Mother! be love of thee a ray From Heaven to show the heavenward way.
Sweet Day-Star! let thy beauty be A light to draw my soul to thee."
May we not once more speak the name of Mary, the Blessed Mother, not to adore her as a divinity, but to win from her an illustration of our common humanity in one of its great sorrows and consolations? Cheerfully as under the returning smile of heaven, solemnly as in presence of much grief, our meditation now turns upon orphanage of the affections, as one of the facts of our homes, and upon the secondary relations which may be its solace.
Consider, first of all, the fact as one of the events of every life, sooner or later. Mary at the Cross is a representation of our common humanity in its bereavements. Every mother and every parent in some way enters into her anguish, as she saw the life of her Divine Son ebbing from those cruel wounds. She was indeed doubly bereaved,--at once childless and fatherless for the victim upon the Cross had been at once the son of her travail and the father of her faith, born of her into the world that she might be born of Him into the spiritual kingdom. His own pains did not make Him insensible to her anguish, nor indifferent to the fact common to our nature, which feels itself always so void and desolate, when the being of all most loved is suddenly taken away. Tenderly He provided for her the consolation that she needed, by commending her to the disciple, whose ever present kindness would be so great a solace in itself, and so powerful a remembrance of the departed by its associations. The disciple took to his house from that hour the mother of Him upon whose bosom he had leaned.
Life is full of cases that illustrate the same principles, although not connected with facts so peculiar. It may be said indeed, that some kind of orphanage is the lot of every person, whose years are not early cut off, and whose heart is not utterly hardened against home affections. The order of nature is that children should survive their parents, and very many of us in tender childhood have learned the worth of kind and judicious parents, by being called to face the trials and cares of life without their counsel and comfort. When the case is reversed, and the parent is mourner for the child, the desolation of the heart is quite as great, and the affections, deprived of their wonted object, are, perhaps, more deeply wounded than the child's can be, even when losing the only protector in losing the parent; so strongly do the affections press downward, and so mightily does the love that sacrifices so much for offspring grow by its own exercise. Every day this bereavement strikes somewhere, and since my last word to you, it has stricken parents whose oldest child was last Sunday present at church, and to-day is in his grave;--on Sunday I spoke to that bright boy pleasantly at our school, and on Friday said the funeral service over his coffin. Never can such a bereavement come without leaving a feeling of double orphanage, for parents in losing their offspring lose at once an instructor as well as a pupil; and surely the eldest born of a family, however young, is spiritually father or mother of much that is best in the parent's heart. Survey life in its whole compass, enlarge our own experience by observation, and we need no argument to interpret Mary's desolation at the Cross, or to learn that some form of orphanage is the common lot; nay, that before life ceases, some portion of our life is severed, when those in whose companionship we had lived are taken away. The world is full of such desolation, and there are many to whom existence is a burden, because its light has thus gone out.