Abraham, forsake us not utterly! Our
fathers trusted Thee, and were not put to shame! Oh, deliver our feet
from falling, and our souls from going down to the pit! Lord, help our
unbelief!

In some such form as this the storm of doubt and anguish must have
torn the minds of those mourners. But the storm is not yet over; the
deepest darkness has not yet come. Their brother is dead. Death
with his marks, which once seen can never be mistaken, stamps every
lineament of that well-known countenance. It is death's colour on the
cheek; death's cold stiffness in the limbs; and no hand but his could
so close those eyes and make rigid those lips. There is no swoon here!
Swathe him then in the garments of the grave; make ready for the
funeral; let him be buried for ever out of sight; follow him to the
ancestral tomb, and let the other household dead be remembered, and
the other sad processions from the home of the living to the home of
the lost and gone be recalled, and think that as they never returned,
so never can he. Lay the body gently down beside those who have been
long sleeping there; look at it; remember the past since childhood;
weep and say farewell; return, Martha and Mary, with wrung hearts to
your home, and see the empty room and listen for a voice that is no
more, and experience a second death in the emptiness, the silence of
this changed abode, and let the heaviest burden of all be borne, the
deepest sorrow of all be endured--_the doubt of a Saviour's love!_

Yes, that terrible agony of doubt was there. Other friends came to
sympathise with them, and to be present with them at the funeral; but
this Friend was absent, and did not send even one comforting message!
Of what avail is His coming now? for Lazarus has been dead four days,
and corruption is already doing its foul work on his body. Here is
"darkness that might be felt!"

Would that we could feel how real all this mysterious sorrow must have
been to those sisters--_our_ sisters, with our hearts, affections, and
sympathies--that so we may be the more prepared to receive the blessed
teaching which this narrative is designed to afford, and have our
faith strengthened by seeing how the darkness and perplexity which
belong so often to God's providential dealings towards us, may be
caused by the deepest workings of that very love which we do not for a
time see, and therefore may in our blindness and weakness for a time
doubt.

But we must now look at the other