nd stars. What a revelation of love is
this--"Jesus wept!" But what mean these tears? They are visibly
significant of much sorrow. The cup of the "Man of sorrows" was always
full; what caused it thus to run over? Only twice in His life do we
read of the Saviour's weeping,--now, when at Bethany, and in a few
days afterwards, when entering Jerusalem during the week of His
crucifixion. Did Jesus now weep from mere human sympathy with sisters
mourning for a dead brother? or did He weep because He mourned their
own lost faith in His love to them? We are well aware of the tenacity
with which most people cling to the former method of accounting for
the Saviour's tears, and what pain it seems to give when the latter
view is pressed upon them, as if they were thereby robbed of some
special source of comfort in affliction, and left without any other
declaration in the Word of God--at all events, without any other
incident in the life of Jesus--fitted to inspire confidence in His
sympathy. It is not difficult to account for this feeling on our
part. For it is much easier to understand tears shed for mere human
suffering, than tears shed for human sin. The one kind of sorrow
is common, the other is rare. The one is almost instinctive, and
necessarily springs from that benevolence which belongs to us as men,
but the other can only spring from that love of souls which belongs to
us as "partakers of the sufferings of Christ," and from possessing,
therefore, a realising sense of the infinite importance of a right or
wrong state of being towards God, and from beholding the darkness of
evil casting its dread shadows over a dear one's spirit. Hence an
atheist can mourn over our loss of friends by death, while the man of
God alone can mourn over our loss of God himself by unbelief. Then,
again, every person welcomes the sympathy of another in his sorrows;
while he might at the same time have no sympathy with the grief
experienced by another for his sins. The one might be gladly welcomed
as most loving, but the other be proudly rejected as most offensive.

Why therefore should true Christians cling with such fondness to the
idea of Christ weeping with Martha and Mary, because they lost their
brother, and not rather see a far deeper love and a source of far
deeper comfort in his tears, because they had, for a moment even, lost
their faith? Surely those who know Christ do not depend solely on such
a proof as this of the reality of His humanit