ng grain.
Some wandering olive or unsocial fig
Amid the broken rooks which bound the path
Snatches scant nurture from the creviced stone."[5]

Before closing these prefatory remarks, the question cannot fail to have
occurred to the most unobservant reader, why the history of the Family
of Bethany and the Resurrection of Lazarus, in themselves so replete
with interest and instruction--the latter, moreover, forming, as it did,
so notable a crisis in the Saviour's life--should have been recorded
only by the Evangelist John. Strange that the other inspired penmen
should have left altogether unchronicled this touching episode in sacred
writ. One or other of two reasons--or both combined--we may accept as
the most satisfactory explanation regarding what, after all, must remain
a difficulty. John alone of the Gospel writers narrates the transactions
which took place in _Judea_ in connexion with the Saviour's public
ministry,--the others restricted themselves mainly to the incidents and
events of His _Galilean_ life and journeys; at all events, till they
come to the closing scene of all.[6] There is another reason equally
probable:--A wise Christian prudence, and delicate consideration for the
feelings of the living, may have prevented the other Evangelists giving
publicity to facts connected with their Lord's greatest miracle; a
premature disclosure of which might have exposed Lazarus and his sisters
to the violence of the unscrupulous persecutors of the day. They would,
moreover, (as human feelings are the same in every age,) naturally
shrink from violating the peculiar sacredness of domestic grief by
publishing circumstantially its details while the mourners and the
mourned still lingered at their Bethany home. Well did they know that
that Holy Spirit at whose dictation they wrote, would not suffer "the
Church of the future" to be deprived of so precious a record of divine
love and power. Hence the sacred task of being the Biographer of Lazarus
was consigned to their aged survivor.

When the Apostle of Patmos wrote his Gospel, as is supposed in distant
Ephesus, Mary, Martha, and Lazarus were, in all likelihood, reposing in
their graves. Happily so, too, for ere this the Roman armies were
encamped almost within sight of their old dwelling, and the inhabitants
of Jerusalem undergoing their unparalleled sufferings.

Add to this, John, of all the Evangelists, was best qualified to do
justice to this matchless pict