arities of life;--in all His
refined and hallowed sensibilities "made like unto His brethren."
Friendship is itself a holy thing. The bright intelligences in the upper
sanctuary know it and experience it. They "cry one to another." Theirs
is no solitary strain--no isolated existence. Unlike the planets in the
material firmament, shining distant and apart, they are rather
clustering constellations, whose gravitation-law is unity and love, this
binding them to one another, and all to God. Nay--with reverence we say
it--may not the archetype of all friendship be found shadowed forth in
what is higher still, those mystic and ineffable communings subsisting
between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in a past eternity? We can thus
regard the friendship of Jesus on earth--like all ennobled, purified
affections--as an emanation from the Divine; a sacred and holy rill,
flowing direct from the Fountain of infinite love. How our adorable Lord
in the days of His flesh fondly clung even to hearts that grew faithless
when fidelity was most needed! What was it but a noble and touching
tribute to the longings and susceptibilities of His holy soul for human
friendship, when, on entering the precincts of Gethsemane, He thus
sought to mitigate the untold sorrows of that awful hour--"Tarry _ye_
here and _watch_ with _Me_!"

But to return. Such was the home around which the memories of its
inmates and our own love to linger.

Mary, Martha, and Lazarus--all three partakers of the same grace,
fellow-pilgrims Zionward, and that journey sanctified and hallowed by a
sacred fellowship with the Lord of pilgrims. The Saviour's own precious
promise seems under that roof of lowly unobtrusive love to receive a
living fulfilment: "Where two or three are gathered together in my name,
there am I in the midst of them." Though many a gorgeous palace was at
that era adorning the earth, where was the spot, what the dwelling, half
so consecrated as this? Solomon had a thousand years before, two miles
distant, in presence of assembled Israel, uttered the exclamation, "But
will God in very deed dwell with men upon earth?" He was now verily
dwelling! Nor was it under any gorgeous canopy or august temple. He had
selected Three Human Souls as the shrines He most loved. He had sought
their holy, heavenly converse as the sweetest incense and costliest
sacrifice. How or where they first saw Jesus we cannot tell. They had
probably been among the number of those pious Jews