with their stomachs and their places to sleep; they
quarrelled with the different villagers, and doubtless wished
themselves back a hundred times to their fishing-banks and kindred
employments, when the Christ moved a little apart from them. I can see
them (behind His back), daring each other to approach and make known
their fancied injustices and rebellions. It was so with the multitudes
before they looked upon His countenance.

"But when He turns, whether in sorrow or in anger, the look is
invincible.... That is always true, whether the Face is turned upon
one, or the Twelve, or the multitude--in the crowded market-place, or
by the sea where the many were fed, or on the Mount--perfect tributes
of silence answered His direct attention, and all spiteful, petty ego
outcroppings vanished.... So there were two Figures: One, a man,
slender, tired and tortured; and an Angel Countenance, before whose
lustrous communications all men were abased according to their spirit."

He paused, but the women did not speak....

"Dear God, how lonely He was!" Bedient said after a moment, as he
regarded a picture of the Christ alone on the Mount, and the soldiers
ascending to make the arrest "There were two who might have sustained
in His daily death agonies. I have always wished they could have been
near Him throughout the Passion. _They_ would not have slept, that
darkest of nights while He prayed! I mean Saint Paul, who of course did
not see the Jesus of history, and John the Baptist, who was given to
know Him but an hour at the beginning. They were the greatest mortals
of those days.... They were above the attractions of women of flesh. Do
you see what I mean? They were humanly complete, beyond sex! Their
grandeur of soul meant a _union within themselves_ of militant manhood
and mystic womanhood. Illumination really means that. They could have
sustained and ministered unto the Christ with real tenderness.

"Invariably, I think, this is true: It is a woman, or _the woman in
man_ that recognizes a Messiah.... Look at those males of singing
flesh--the ultra-masculine Romans--how blind and how torpid they were
to Him; and the materialistic Jews, ponderously confronting each other
with stupid forms and lifeless rituals, while their Marys and Magdalens
and Miriams followed the Master and waited upon Him!... I always found
a kind of soulful feminine in John, the apostle--not the Forerunner,
but the brother of James. He was weak in those da