dearest in the morning of his days went
down into the shadows of death.

Was Mary the highly-favored among women, and was Jesus indeed the
blessed,--or was the angel mistaken? If they were these, if we are
Christians, it ought to be a settled and established habit of our souls
to regard something else as prosperity than worldly success and happy
marriages. That life is a success which, like the life of Jesus, in its
beginning, middle, and close, has borne a perfect witness to the truth
and the highest form of truth. It is true that God has given to us, and
inwoven in our nature a desire for a perfection and completeness made
manifest to our senses in this mortal life. To see the daughter bloom
into youth and womanhood, the son into manhood, to see them marry and
become themselves parents, and gradually ripen and develop in the
maturities of middle life, gradually wear into a sunny autumn, and so be
gathered in fullness of time to their fathers,--such, one says, is the
programme which God has made us to desire; such the ideal of happiness
which he has interwoven with our nerves, and for which our heart and our
flesh crieth out; to which every stroke of a knell is a violence, and
every thought of an early death is an abhorrence.

But the life of Christ and his mother sets the foot on this lower ideal
of happiness, and teaches us that there is something higher. His
ministry began with declaring, "Blessed are they that mourn." It has
been well said that prosperity was the blessing of the Old Testament,
and adversity of the New. Christ came to show us a nobler style of
living and bearing; and so far as he had a personal and earthly life, he
buried it as a corner-stone on which to erect a new immortal style of
architecture.

Of his own, he had nothing, neither houses, nor lands, nor family ties,
nor human hopes, nor earthly sphere of success; and as a human life, it
was all a sacrifice and a defeat. He was rejected by his countrymen,
whom the passionate anguish of his love and the unwearied devotion of
his life could not save from an awful doom. He was betrayed by weak
friends, prevailed against by slanderers, overwhelmed with an
ignominious death in the morning of youth, and his mother stood by his
cross, and she was the only woman whom God ever called highly favored in
this world.

This, then, is the great and perfect ideal of what God honors. Christ
speaks of himself as bread to be eaten,--bread, simple, humble,
unpre