was yet dark." So he remembered Judas starting when "it
was night" on his errand, of which Mary's was the sad result. One was a
deed of love which no darkness hindered: the other was a deed of hate
which no darkness prevented or concealed.

John had a special reason for remembering Mary. When she had seen that
the stone was taken away from the tomb, it had a different meaning to
her from what it did when she and John saw it on Friday evening. And
when she "found not the body of the Lord Jesus," she imagined that
either friends had borne it away, or foes had robbed the tomb. In
surprise, disappointment and anxiety, her first impulse was to make it
known--to whom else than to him who had sorrowed with her at the
stone-closed door? So she "ran"--not with unwomanly haste, but with the
quickened step of woman's love--"to Simon Peter and to the other
disciple whom Jesus loved." They were both loved, but not in the fuller
sense elsewhere applied to John. Astonished at her early call, startled
at the wildness of her grief, sharing her anxiety, "they ran both
together" "toward the tomb" from which she had so hastily come. But it
was an uneven race. John, younger and nimbler, "outran Peter and came
first to the tomb." "Yet entered he not in." Reverence and awe make him
pause where love has brought him. For a few moments he is alone. His
earnest gaze confirms the report of Mary that somebody has "taken away
the Lord." He can only ask, Who? Why? Where? No angel gives answer.
Still his gaze is rewarded. "He seeth the linen cloths lying." These are
silent witnesses that the precious body has not been hastily and rudely
snatched away by unfriendly hands, such as had mangled it on the cross.

Peter arriving, everywhere and evermore impulsive, enters at once where
John fears to tread. He discovers what John had not seen,--"the napkin
that was upon His head, not lying with the linen cloths, but rolled up
in a place by itself." John does not tell whose head, so full is he of
the thought of his Lord.

"Then entered in therefore that other disciple also," says John of
himself, showing the influence of his bolder companion upon him. Though
the napkin escaped his notice from without the tomb, it found a
prominent place in his memory after he saw it. Who but an eye-witness
would give us such details? What does he mean us to infer from the
"rolled" napkin put away, if not the calmness and carefulness and
triumph of the Lord of Life as He tar