o not know where S. Mary was during these days, but we are sure that
she was as near our Lord as it was possible for her to be. We know that
her own thought would be of the possibility of ministering to Him. We
know that she would not have fled with the Apostles in their momentary
panic. She was at the Cross, and she was at the grave, and she would
have been as near Him in the agony and the trial as it was possible for
her to be. And she too was in agony. Every pang of our Lord found echo
in her. Every blow that fell upon His bleeding back, she too felt. Every
insult that the soldiers inflicted, hurt her. Our Lord in the
consciousness of His mission is constantly sustained by the thought that
His Passion and Death is an offering to the will of the Father,--an
offering even for these miserable men who are brutally treating a man
whom they know to be innocent. Her sorrow is the utter desolation of
seeing the One Whom she loves above all else suffer, while she can bear
Him no alleviation in His suffering, cannot so much as wipe the blood
from off His wounded brow, cannot even touch His hand, and look her love
into His eyes. She follows from place to place while our Lord is being
hustled from Caiaphas to Pilate and from Pilate to Herod and back again;
from time to time hearing from some one who has succeeded in getting
nearer, how the trial is going on, what the accusation is, how Jesus is
bearing Himself, what answers He has made, what the authorities have
said. Once and again, it may be, catching a distant glimpse of Him as He
is led about by the guards, seeing Him always more worn and weary,
always nearer the point of collapse. Herself, too, nearer collapse; yet
going on still with that strength that love gives to mothers, determined
at the cost of any suffering to be near Him, as near as she can be, till
the very end. So we see her on that day in the streets of Jerusalem,
and think of the distance travelled since the morning when Gabriel said
to her, wondering: "Hail thou that art highly favoured.... Blessed art
thou among women."

We, too, follow. We have so often followed, with the Gospel in our
hands, and wondered at the method of God. We have tried hour after hour
to penetrate the meaning of the Passion, to find what personal message
it brings, to discover what light it throws on our own lives. We have
gone out into Gethsemane and placed ourselves with the three chosen
Apostles while our Lord went on to pray by Himse