The mystic is never quite at leisure for other people’s feelings and sufferings; he is essentially an individualist; he must have his own intercourse with God, and other people’s affairs are apt to be an interruption, an impertinence.  “I have not been thinking of the community; I have been thinking of Christ,” said a Bengali to me, who was wavering between the Brahmo Samaj and Christianity.  The blessed Angela of Foligno was rather glad to be relieved of her husband and children, who died and left her leisure to enjoy the love of God.  All this is quite unlike the real spirit of the historical Jesus.  “Himself took our infirmities and bare our sicknesses,” was a phrase of Isaiah that came instinctively to the minds of his followers (Matt. 8:17, roughly after Isaiah 53:4).  Perhaps when we begin to understand what is meant by the Incarnation, we may find that omnipotence has a great deal more to do than we have supposed with natural sympathy and the genius for entering into the sorrows and sufferings of other people.

One side of the work of Jesus must never be forgotten.  His attitude to woman has altered her position in the world.  No one can study society in classical antiquity or in non-Christian lands with any intimacy and not realize this.  Widowhood in Hinduism, marriage among Muslims—­they are proverbs for the misery of women.  Even the Jew still prays:  “Blessed art thou, O Lord our God!  King of the Universe, who hast not made me a woman.”  The Jewish woman has to be grateful to God, because He “hath made me according to His will”—­a thanksgiving with a different note, as the modern Jewess, Amy Levy, emphasized in her brilliant novel, where her heroine, very like herself, corrected her prayerbook to make it more explicit “cursed art Thou, O Lord our God!  Who hast made me a woman.”  Paul must have known these Jewish prayers, for he emphasized that in Christ there is neither male nor female (Gal. 3:28).  Paul had his views—­the familiar old ways of Tarsus inspired them[25]—­as to woman’s dress and deportment, especially the veil; but he struck the real Christian note here, and laid stress on the fact of what Jesus had done and is doing for women.  There is no reference made by Jesus to woman that is not respectful and sympathetic; he never warns men against women.  Even the most degraded women find in him an amazing sympathy; for he has the secret of being pure and kind at the same time—­his purity has not to be protected; it is itself a purifying force.  He draws some of his most delightful parables from woman’s work, as we have seen.  It is recorded how, when he spoke of the coming disaster of Jerusalem, he paused to pity poor pregnant women and mothers with little babies in those bad times (Luke 21:23; Matt. 24:19).  Critics have remarked on the place of woman in Luke’s Gospel, and some have played with fancies as to the feminine sources whence he drew his knowledge—­did the women who ministered to Jesus, Joanna, for instance, the wife of Chuza