When we give ourselves up to the Father as the Son gave himself, we shall not only find our yoke easy and our burden light, but that they communicate ease and lightness; not only will they not make us weary, but they will give us rest from all other weariness.  Let us not waste a moment in asking how this can be; the only way to know that, is to take the yoke on us.  That rest is a secret for every heart to know, for never a tongue to tell.  Only by having it can we know it.  If it seem impossible to take the yoke on us, let us attempt the impossible; let us lay hold of the yoke, and bow our heads, and try to get our necks under it.  Giving our Father the opportunity, he will help and not fail us.  He is helping us every moment, when least we think we need his help; when most we think we do, then may we most boldly, as most earnestly we must, cry for it.  What or how much his creatures can do or bear, God only understands; but when most it seems impossible to do or bear, we must be most confident that he will neither demand too much, nor fail with the vital creator-help.  That help will be there when wanted—­that is, the moment it can be help.  To be able beforehand to imagine ourselves doing or bearing, we have neither claim nor need.

It is vain to think that any weariness, however caused, any burden, however slight, may be got rid of otherwise than by bowing the neck to the yoke of the Father’s will.  There can be no other rest for heart and soul that he has created.  From every burden, from every anxiety, from all dread of shame or loss, even loss of love itself, that yoke will set us free.

These words of the Lord—­so many as are reported in common by St Matthew and St Luke, namely his thanksgiving, and his statement concerning the mutual knowledge of his father and himself, meet me like a well known face unexpectedly encountered:  they come to me like a piece of heavenly bread cut from the gospel of St John.  The words are not in that gospel, and in St Matthew’s and St Luke’s there is nothing more of the kind—­in St Mark’s nothing like them.  The passage seems to me just one solitary flower testifying to the presence in the gospels of Matthew and Luke of the same root of thought and feeling which everywhere blossoms in that of John.  It looks as if it had crept out of the fourth gospel into the first and third, and seems a true sign, though no proof, that, however much the fourth be unlike the other gospels, they have all the same origin.  Some disciple was able to remember one such word of which the promised comforter brought many to the remembrance of John.  I do not see how the more phenomenal gospels are ever to be understood, save through a right perception of the relation in which the Lord stands to his father, which relation is the main subject of the gospel according to St John.

As to the loving cry of the great brother to the whole weary world which Matthew alone has set down, I seem aware of a certain indescribable individuality in its tone, distinguishing it from all his other sayings on record.