The Lyme Maze Game

Daedalus escapes the maze

 

Universal Workshop

 

 

None except for inheriting the name. The Sunday of tribute to mother churches has been replaced by a Sunday of tribute to mothers.

The American version, Mothers' Day for Peace, was started in 1872 by Julia Ward Howe. During the Civil War, requested to write a patriotic song to replace "John Brown's Body", she wrote "The Battle Hymn of the Republic", but the horrors she later saw determined her to rouse women in protest against all war. This was her declaration:

Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise all women who have hearts! Whether your baptism be that of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
We will not have questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.
From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says, "Disarm, Disarm!"
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice! Blood does not wipe out dishonor nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after their own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.
In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.

Naturally, the "of Peace" part has been dropped by Hallmark Cards and other commercializers of Mothers' Day.

(Its offshoot, Fathers' Day, third Sunday in June, was started in 1909 by Sonora Louise Smart Dodd of Spokane, Washington, after hearing a sermon about Mothers' Day. Her father, William Jackson Smart, had had to care for his six children, his wife having died in childbirth.)

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