to the presence of the glorious Jesus! Impetuous as ever, fearing revenge or treachery, Peter sprang forward, as though to stay the crowd.
"Are ye mad, ye women?" he said impulsively, "to bring this crowd of unbelieving fools to the presence of our Lord? Do ye, too, now seek to slay Him because your brother Lazarus is dead?"
But Mary, conscious only that her Lord, the Messiah whom she loved, was there, near her once more, after these weeks of watching and waiting, fell down in adoration at His feet, echoing, but not in reproach, only in tender faith and love, the words of her sister: "Lord, if Thou hadst been here, my brother had not died."
And, at sight of her great grief and faith, the Jews who stood around wept too, and once more through the olive groves resounded the wail of bitterness: "Look away from me, look away from me, for I will weep bitterly."
Then, in their half belief, reproaching Him, the Jews cried out: "If Thou hadst raised Lazarus we had believed."
No earthly pen would dare describe, no human heart can realise the sympathy and mingled grief of the Messiah. Surely never was the union of the Godhead and the Manhood in the person of the Christ more strongly manifested than at the death of Lazarus and the sorrow of his sisters. The grief of separation, the agony at having been absent, the sorrow of the two women He loved; all this was no less acute because as God He might have avoided it. But to do so would have been to set aside His manhood, to shirk the responsibilities of earthly life. It
