g interests. Let it be the
most wondrous and heart-searching of all the memories of Bethany, that
for thy soul--that traitor, truant, worthless soul--which like a stray
planet He might have suffered to drift away from Himself into the
blackness of eternal darkness--helpless, hopeless, ruined, lost!--Yes!
that for _thee_, JESUS WEPT!

"And doth the Saviour weep
Over His people's sin,
Because we will not let Him keep
The souls He died to win?
Ye hearts that love the Lord,
If at this sight ye burn,
See that in thought, in deed, in word,
Ye hate what made Him mourn."

XIII.

THE GRAVE STONE.

They have now reached the grave. It was a rocky sepulchre. A flat stone
(possibly with some Hebrew inscription) lay upon the mouth of it.

In wondering amazement the sorrowing group follow the footsteps of the
Saviour. "Behold how He loved him," whisper the Jews to one another as
they witness His fast falling tears. Can His repairing thus to the tomb
be anything more than to pay a mournful tribute to an honoured
friendship, and behold the silent home of the loved dead? Nay; He is
about, as the Lord of Life, to wrench away the swaddling-bands of
corruption, to vindicate His name and prerogative as the "Abolisher of
death"--to have the first-fruits of that vast triumph which, ages before
the birth of time, He had anticipated with longing earnestness--"I will
ransom them from the power of the grave, I will redeem them from death.
O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, I will be thy destruction."

Does He proceed forthwith to speak the word, and to accomplish the giant
deed? He breaks silence. But we listen, in the first instance, not to
the omnipotent summons, but to an address to the bystanders--"_Jesus
said, Take ye away the stone!_"[15]

What need of this parenthesis in His mighty work? Why this summoning in
any feeble human agency when His own independent fiat could have
effected the whole? Would it not have been a more startling
manifestation of Omnipotence, by a mandate similar to that which chained
the tempests of Tiberias, or the demoniac of Gadara, to have hurled the
incumbent stone into fragments? Might not He who has "the keys of the
grave and of death" have Himself unlocked the portals preparatory to the
vaster prodigy that was to follow?

Nay, there was a mighty lesson to be read in thus delegating human hands
to remove the intervening barrier. The Church o