timacy no other can claim, that His utterance of our
name has a significance which no other lips can give it? Do we find it
difficult to enter into true intercourse with Him; do we envy Mary her
few minutes in the garden? As truly as by the audible utterance of our
name does Christ now invite us to the perfect joy there is in His
friendship; so truly as if He stood with us alone, as with Mary in the
garden, and as if none but ourselves were present; as if our name alone
filled His lips, our wants alone occupied His heart. Let us not miss
true personal intercourse with Christ. Let nothing cheat us of this
supreme joy and life of the soul. Let us not slothfully or shyly say, "I
can never be on such terms of intimacy with Christ,--I who am so unlike
Him; so full of desires He cannot gratify; so frivolous, superficial,
unreal, while He is so real, so earnest; so unloving while He is so
loving; so reluctant to endure hardness, with views of life and aims so
opposed to His; so unable to keep a pure and elevated purpose
steadfastly in my mind." Mary was once trodden under foot of evil, a
wreck in whom none but Christ saw any place for hope. It is what is in
_Him_ that is powerful. He has won His supremacy by love, by refusing to
enjoy His private rights without our sharing them; and He maintains His
supremacy by love, teaching all to love Him, subduing to devotedness the
hardest heart--not by a remote exhibition of cold, unemotional
perfection, but by the persistence and depth of His warm and individual
love.

Mary had no time to reason and doubt. With one quick exclamation of
ecstatic recognition and joy she sprang towards Him. The one word "my
Master,"[30] uttered all her heart. It is related of George Herbert
that when he was inducted into the cure of Bemerton he said to a friend:
"I beseech God that my humble and charitable life may so win upon others
as to bring glory to my Jesus, whom I have this day taken to be my
Master and my Governor, and I am so proud of His service that I will
always call Him Jesus, my Master." His biographer adds: "He seems to
rejoice in that word Jesus, and says that the adding these words 'my
Master' to it and the often repetition of them seemed to perfume his
mind." With Mary the title was one of indefinite respect; she found in
Jesus one she could always reverence and trust. The firm, loving hand
that admits no soft evasion of duty; the steadfast step that with
equanimity ever goes straight fo