His Mothers Blessing
HIS MOTHERS BLESSING
Once again when many young men were gathered from all over the eastern part of our country in the World's Students' Conference, Mr. Moody said:
"You know my mother is an old lady. She is too feeble to attend these meetings. She is deeply interested in this work, and she has prayed earnestly for its success. I want her to hear some of you speak and sing. We are going up the mountain this afternoon to pray for the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Meet me at my house at three o'clock. We will have a little service there and then I want you to go on to my mother's home, and I want some of you to speak, and we will all sing.
"I want you to receive my mother's blessing before we go to the mountains to pray, for next to the blessing of God I place that of my mother."
The three hundred anxious pilgrims who gathered on Mr. Moody's spacious lawn that afternoon, and who, after a brief service of song and prayer, journeyed on to the mother's cottage and later to the mountain top, presented a picture never to be forgotten by the members of that company.
Much that is here written is his own words concerning her. I have an Old mother away down in the Connecticut Mountains," Mr. Moody used to say,
"and I have been in the habit of going to see her ever year for twenty years. Suppose I go there and say, ' Mother, you were very kind to me when I was young--you were very good to me; when father died you worked hard for us all to keep us together, and so I have come to see you, because it is my duty. Then she would say to me, 'Well, my son, if you only come to see me, because it is your duty, you need not come again. And that is the way with a great many servants of God. They work for Him, because it is their duty - not for love. Let us abolish this word duty, and feel that it is only a privilege to work for God, and let us try to remember that what is done merely from a sense of duty is not acceptable to God."
And so it was. Year after year, in the very heat of those spiritual campaigns which brought him prominently before the people of the two continents, Mr. Moody would slip away regularly to the spot where, amid the serene surroundings of the Northfield hills, his mother sat with her thoughts upon him and his work, praising God who had permitted her boy to become the instrument of so much blessing.