be trivial, and is certainly obscure. Let
us take the most remarkable instance of all,--the Christ, whom no
scepticism can dethrone from the foremost place in human history,--who,
whatever else he was, must be admitted even by unbelief to have set his
mark upon mankind more deeply than any other son of men. Yet how he
emerges upon the world out of secrecy and silence! Whatever bright cloud
of hope and prophecy had formerly floated about his cradle, has long
been scattered and forgotten; and he comes, from his Galilean hills, one
of the simple folk who earned their bread in the sweat of their brow,
unlearned save in the ancestral wisdom of his people, unheralded but by
the village estimate of a sweet and innocent life, to finish the work of
a long line of prophets, and to lift humanity nearer to God. And we are
often so eager to prove the singularity of his mission, and to take him
out of the category of other workers for God, as to miss the great
lesson which is to be learned of the way in which the Father always
trains and educates a faithful and victorious Son. Of his mother, who
knows anything, save what the few hints and statements of the
Evangelists disclose? A superstition, not without its tender and
graceful side, has taken her from her cottage home at Nazareth, and
crowned her Queen of Heaven; till all the familiar extravagances of
mythology have obliterated even from men's imagination the lines of a
sweet and strong human character. And yet what a marvellous woman must
have been this unknown mother of Christ! What depth of tenderness, what
steadiness of judgment, what a majestic and yet winning purity, what a
faculty of self-devotion (not yet too hardly tried), what a simple
intensity of devoutness, must have watched and helped the child, as he
grew and blossomed into man! What airs from heaven must have blown about
that lowly roof, filling all who dwelt beneath it with a noble
simplicity of content with their own lot, and one, with a nobler
discontent with the world's innumerable wrongs and sufferings! These
were God's quiet ways, and the very record of them has disappeared; they
survive only in their result. But there is no son in whom mother's blood
does not flow, and though now we know not how or where, the Mary of whom
the world is ignorant, lived and spoke and died in the Christ, to whom
the world looks up.

So no mistake can be greater than to suppose that all the world's best
work is done by the eloque