l to you a couple of other places in which it is
employed in the New Testament. You remember that touching incident
about our Lord when, being '_wearied_ with His journey, He sat
thus on the well.' 'Wearied' is the same word as is here used. Then,
you remember how the Apostle, after he had been hauling empty nets
all night in the little, wet, dirty fishing-boat, said, perhaps with
a yawn, 'Master, we have _toiled_ all the night and caught
nothing.' He uses the same word as is employed here. Such is the sort
of work that these women had done--work carried to the point of
exhaustion, work up to the very edge of their powers, work unsparing
and continuous, and not done once in some flash of evanescent
enthusiasm, but all through a dreary night, in spite of apparent
failures.

_There_ is the measure of service. Many of us seem to think that
if we say 'I am tired,' that is a reason for not doing anything.
Sometimes it is, no doubt; and no man has a right so to labour as to
impair his capacity for future labour, but subject to that condition
I do not know that the plea of fatigue is a sufficient reason for
idleness. And I am quite sure that the true example for us is the
example of Him who, when He was most wearied, sitting on the well,
was so invigorated and refreshed by the opportunity of winning
another soul that, when His disciples came back to Him, they looked
at His fresh strength with astonishment, and said to themselves, 'Has
any man brought Him anything to eat?' Ay, what He had to eat was work
that He finished for the Father, and some of us know that the truest
refreshment in toil is a change of toil. It is almost as good to
shift the load on to the other shoulder, or to take a stick into the
other hand, as it is to put away the load altogether. Oh, the careful
limits which Christian people nowadays set to their work for Jesus!
They are not afraid of being tired in their pursuit of business or
pleasure, but in regard to Christ's work they will let anything go to
wrack and ruin rather than that they should turn a hair, by
persevering efforts to prevent it. Work to the limit of power if you
live in the light of blessedness.

She 'laboured much in the Lord,' or, as Jesus Christ said about the
other woman who was blamed by the people that did not love enough to
understand the blessedness of self-sacrifice, 'she had done what she
could.' It was an apology for the form of Mary's service, but it was
a stringent demand as