Rocking the world

Here's a quote my sister found in Female Piety by John Angell James that we found sweet, inspiring and encouraging. The last part we dedicate to my Oma, a very strongly minded woman, who believed that truth whole-heartedly...we would agree with a touch more humility, yet we acknowledge that you never know what the Lord has planned for your child. This is a sobering and exciting thought as I embark on motherhood. I am anticipating the joy of watching my child become the man or woman they are meant to be.

"What associations with all that is lovely are connected with that blissful word, "mother"! To that sound the tenderest emotions of the human heart, whether in the bosom of the savage or the sage, wake up. The beauty of that term is seen, and its power felt, alike by the prince and the peasant, the rustic and the philosopher. It is one of the words which infant lips are first taught to lisp, and the charm of which the infant heart first feels. It is a note to the music of which it is difficult to say child. Humanity, however semi-brutalized by oppression, ignorance, or even vice, has rarely been sunk so low as to have the last spark of maternal love extinguished, or the last sensibility of this kind crushed out of it. This strength of woman's love for her child must be turned to good account, and be directed by its exercises to the best and most useful of purposes...woman's heart is made to love; and love is exerted more gently, sweetly, and constrainingly upon her child by her than by the other sex. It makes her more patient, more ingenious, and therefore, more influential...Hence, to repeat an expression of Monod, "The greatest moral power in the world is that which a mother exercises over her young child. Nor is there much exaggeration in that other expression, "She who rocks the cradle rules the world."