Oh, my friends, such poor women seemed to me most glorious, most honourable, most venerable!  What was all rank or fashion, beauty or accomplishments, when compared with the great honour which the Lord Jesus Christ was putting upon those poor women, by transforming them thus into His own most blessed likeness, and giving them grace to go about, as He the Lord Jesus did, doing good, because God was with them!

Then I felt that such women, poor, and worn, and hard-handed as they were, were ladies in the sight of that Heavenly Father, who is no respecter of persons; and felt how truly a wise ancient has said,—­ ’It is virtue, yea, virtue, gentlemen, which maketh gentlemen; which maketh the poor rich, the strong weak, the simple wise, the base-born noble.  This rank neither the whirling wheel of Fortune can destroy, nor the deceitful cavillings of worldlings separate; neither sickness abate, nor time abolish.’  No; for it is written, that though prophecies shall fail, tongues cease, knowledge vanish away, and all that we now know is but in part, yet charity shall never fail those who are full of the Spirit of Love, but abide with them for ever and ever, bringing forth fruit through all eternity to everlasting life.

But what sort of virtue?  Do not mistake that.  Not what the world calls virtue; not mere legal respectability, which says, I do unto others as they do unto me; which is often merely the whitening outside the sepulchre, and leaves the heart within unrenewed, unrighteous, full of pride and ambition, conceit, cunning, and envy, and unbelief in God:  not that virtue, but the virtue which the Apostle tells us to add to our faith, the virtue from above, which is the same as the wisdom from above, which is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, easy to be entreated; in one word, the Holy Spirit of God, the Spirit of Divine Love and Charity, which seeketh not its own, which St. Paul has described to us in this epistle; the Holy Spirit of God, with which the Lord Jesus was filled without measure, and which He manifested to all the world in His most blessed life and death.

Ah, my friends, this is not an easy lesson to learn.  Christ’s disciples and apostles could not learn it all at once.  They tried to hinder little children from coming to Him.  They rebuked the blind man who called after Him.  How could the great Prophet of Nazareth stoop to trouble Himself about such poor insignificant people?  They could not conceive, either, why the Lord Jesus should choose to die shamefully, when He might have lived in honour:  it seemed unworthy of Him.  They were shocked at His words.  ’That be far from Thee, Lord,’ said Peter.  Afterwards, when they really understood what that word ‘Lord,’ meant, and what sort of a man a true and perfect Lord ought to be, then they saw how fit, and proper, and glorious, Christ’s self-sacrifice was.  When, too, they learnt to look on Him, not merely as a great prophet, but as the Son of the Living God, then they understood His conduct, and saw that it behoved an only-begotten Son of God to suffer all these things before He entered into His glory.