e--love
of the Son Whom she had brought forth and Whom she had followed so far.
She lived in His appearings; and between them she lived in remembrance
of them. One does not think of her as dwelling very much on what He
says, but as dwelling upon Him. The thought of Him absorbs her. She has
passed into that relation to our Lord that in the years to come many
souls will strive to acquire--the state of absorbed contemplation, the
state in which all things else for the time recede and one is alone with
God. God so fills the soul that there is room there for nothing else.

For the Apostles these were days of immense importance as days in which
they were compelled to reconstruct their whole view of the meeting of
our Lord's mission and of their relation to it. They came to these days
with their settled notion about the renewed Kingdom of Israel and of our
Lord's reign on earth which His teaching hitherto had not been able to
expel; but now they are compelled to see that the Kingdom of God of
which they are to be the missionaries is a Kingdom in another sense than
they had so far conceived it. It differs vastly from their dream of an
Israelite empire. It is no doubt true that this mental revolution is of
slow operation, and that even when certain truths are grasped it will
still take time to grasp them in all their implications. For long their
Judaism will impede their full understanding of the meaning of the
Kingdom of God. It will be years before they can see that it is a
non-Jewish fact and that other nations will stand on an equality with
them. But they will by the end of the Forty Days have grasped the fact
that they are not engaged in a secular revolution and are not entering
on a career of worldly power. They will be ready for their active
ministry after Pentecost, a ministry of spiritual initiation into the
Kingdom of God. When in response to their preaching men asked the
question: "Men and brethren, what shall we do?" They were ready with
their answer: "Repent and be baptised every one of you in the name of
Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of
the Holy Ghost."

So the Forty Days were filled with new meanings emerging from the old
teaching, of suddenly grasped significance in some saying of our Lord
that they had assumed that they understood but in reality had attributed
little meaning to. It is one of the striking things about our relation
to spiritual truth that we can go on for l