Yet, when all this has been said, I am strongly inclined to think that the mother’s love, though the greatest that can be found in any one heart, is not the perfect, fully grown love.  The human unit is not a man nor a woman, but a man and a woman.  Perfect love requires more than one or two for its matured growth into full life.  It cannot exist in its full strength and fragrant sweets except where three are joined together to draw out its full depth and meaning.

There must be two whose hearts are fully joined in love, each finding answering and ever-satisfying love in the other; and so each love growing to full ripeness in the warm sunshine of the other love.  And then there needs to be a third one, who comes as a result of that mutual love, and who constantly draws out the love of the other two.

For love in itself is creative.  It yearns to bring into being another upon whom it may freely lavish itself.  That other one must be of its own sort, upon its own level.  Nothing less ever satisfies.  And so the love poured out draws out to itself an answering love fully as full as its own.  And then, having yearned, it does more.  It creates.  It must create.  It must bring forth life; and life like its own in all its powers and privileges.  This is the very life of love in its full expression.

Yet to say all this is simply to spell out fully, in all its letters and syllables, the great, the greatest of passions, mother-love, which we agreed a moment ago was the highest.  For mother-love is not restricted to woman, though among us humans it often finds its brightest expressions in her.  It knows no restriction of sex.  It is simply love at its fullest and highest and freest and tenderest; free to do as it will, and to do it as fully as it will.  Love left to itself, free to do as its heart dictates, will give its very self, its life, that life may come to another.  This is the great passion called love, the greatest of all passions.

The Genesis Picture.

Now, maybe you think we have swung pretty far away from that first chapter of the Genesis revelation.  No; you are mistaken there.  We have been walking, with rapid stride, by the shortest road, straight into its inner heart.  Let us look a bit at the picture of God sketched for us in this earliest page of revelation.

There are two creations here, first of the earth, man’s home; and then of man himself who was to live in the home.  Here at once in the beginning is mother-love.  Before the new life comes the mother is absorbed in getting the home ready; the best and softest and homiest home that her mother-love can think of, and her fingers fix.  The same mother instinct in the birds spends itself in getting the nest ready, and then patiently broods until the new occupants come to take possession.

The Bible never calls God a mother, though the mother language, as here, is used of Him many times.  It takes more of the human to tell the divine.  You must take many words, and several of our human relationships, and put them together, in the finest meaning of each, to get near the full meaning of what God is.  Up on the higher level, with God, the word “father” really includes all that both father and mother mean to us.