And the earnest, loving voice made answer: "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."
It had been happy, that home at Bethany, on which such grief had fallen. Separated from their father, Simon, by the laws of the country, by reason of his leprosy, they yet nurtured great affection for him, and often visited him.
Martha and Mary, united by the common grief of widowhood, had agreed to share the house in Bethany, and to make a home for their younger brother, Lazarus, a man whose learning and integrity had earned for him the place of youngest ruler of the Synagogue. They represented in the Jewish people a type of persons that, before and since, has been found in every place, in every country namely, a quiet, God-fearing family, who, from the very discretion of their acts, brought no comment and no interference on themselves.
From their earliest youth they had been trained to follow, not so much the laws of the High Priest as the ancient commandments of Moses; and, till their father had been struck with sudden leprosy for having, in a fit of drunkenness, blasphemed, they had merely led moral, orthodox lives according to the Jewish tenets, without concerning themselves with any special sect or doctrine. It was only when this swift visitation came upon them, with its awful certainty and rapid judgment, followed by the compulsory alienation from the home, and later, when the sorrow of widowhood was added, that their thoughts, pressed back into the purifying furnaces of
