visibly significant of much sorrow.  The cup of the “Man of sorrows” was always full; what caused it thus to run over?  Only twice in His life do we read of the Saviour’s weeping,—­now, when at Bethany, and in a few days afterwards, when entering Jerusalem during the week of His crucifixion.  Did Jesus now weep from mere human sympathy with sisters mourning for a dead brother? or did He weep because He mourned their own lost faith in His love to them?  We are well aware of the tenacity with which most people cling to the former method of accounting for the Saviour’s tears, and what pain it seems to give when the latter view is pressed upon them, as if they were thereby robbed of some special source of comfort in affliction, and left without any other declaration in the Word of God—­at all events, without any other incident in the life of Jesus—­fitted to inspire confidence in His sympathy.  It is not difficult to account for this feeling on our part.  For it is much easier to understand tears shed for mere human suffering, than tears shed for human sin.  The one kind of sorrow is common, the other is rare.  The one is almost instinctive, and necessarily springs from that benevolence which belongs to us as men, but the other can only spring from that love of souls which belongs to us as “partakers of the sufferings of Christ,” and from possessing, therefore, a realising sense of the infinite importance of a right or wrong state of being towards God, and from beholding the darkness of evil casting its dread shadows over a dear one’s spirit.  Hence an atheist can mourn over our loss of friends by death, while the man of God alone can mourn over our loss of God himself by unbelief.  Then, again, every person welcomes the sympathy of another in his sorrows; while he might at the same time have no sympathy with the grief experienced by another for his sins.  The one might be gladly welcomed as most loving, but the other be proudly rejected as most offensive.

Why therefore should true Christians cling with such fondness to the idea of Christ weeping with Martha and Mary, because they lost their brother, and not rather see a far deeper love and a source of far deeper comfort in his tears, because they had, for a moment even, lost their faith?  Surely those who know Christ do not depend solely on such a proof as this of the reality of His humanity, and of His sympathy with the affliction of His brethren; nor can that kind of sympathy be the highest which can be afforded by all men whose hearts are not utterly steeled by selfish indifference.  Besides, however real Christ’s sympathy was with sorrow of every kind, why did He express it on this occasion more than on any other?  Nay, why did He weep at the very moment when He purposed, by a miracle of power, to restore the dead brother to his sisters, and in a few minutes to turn their sorrow into joy?  Why weep with those whose tears were shed in ignorance only of the coming event which was so soon to dry them?  But the Saviour’s