“No, no, Laddie, I’m not ill.  I just came to tuck you in for the night as I used to do at home. ...  Lie still, my Laddie.”

And she tucked the clothes about his neck, and smoothed his hair, and patted his cheek, and kissed his face.  And she crooned over him as mother with little child.  The years were quite forgot.  She had her little son again.  And she talked mother’s love-talk to a child.  “Good-night, Laddie ... good-night ... good-night ... mother’s own boy.”  And a little more tucking and smoothing and patting and kissing, and then she turned so quietly, picked up the candle, and went out, closing the door so softly, her great strength revealed in her gentleness.

And he was just on the point of starting up and saying, “Mother, you must stay with me, right here”—­no, the morning will do, he thought.  But when the morning came she wasn’t down for breakfast.  And when he went to her room she wasn’t there.  It turned out afterwards that she had said to herself, “It doesn’t suit my Laddie’s plans to have me here.  I don’t understand why.  It isn’t his fault at all.  It just doesn’t suit.  And I’ll never be a trouble to my Laddie.”

And so with that rare characteristic English trait of independence, she had quietly gone off early that morning before the house was astir.  And he broken-hearted—­I’m always glad to remember that—­he searched through the wilderness of London for more than a year, searched diligently, but could find no trace of her.  And then he was graciously permitted to minister to her last hours in a hospital where a street accident had sent her unconscious, and where he was chief of the medical staff.

She came to her own and her own received her not. He loved her, but it didn’t suit his plans. He, Jesus, came to His own, and His own received Him not; it didn’t suit their plans.  Ah! listen yet further:  He comes to His own, you and me, and His own—­you finish it.  Have we some plans, too, set plans, that we don’t propose to change, even for—­(softly) even for Him?  Each of us is finishing that sentence, not in words so much if at all, in the words of our action.  And the crowd reads our translation.

The Oldest Family.

“But,” John goes on.  That was a steadying “but.”  It was hard on John to recall how they treated his Friend and Master.  But there is a “but.”  There’s another aide, an offset to what he’s been saying, a bright bit to offset the black bit.  But as many as did receive Him.  Some received.  Jesus was rejected, yes, abominably, contemptibly rejected.  But He was also accepted, gladly, joyously, wholeheartedly accepted, even though it came to mean pain and shame.

As many as received Him, John says, He received into His family.  The conception of a family and of a home where the family lives, runs all through underneath here.  They would not receive this Jesus because He didn’t belong to the inner circle of the old families which they represented.  They regarded themselves as the custodians of the exclusive aristocratic circles of Jerusalem.  And Jerusalem was the upper circle of Israel.