to us;--and the one shall
speak sneeringly, brutally, and raise in us indignation or despair;
another shall use the same words, but solemnly, tenderly, and raise in us
confidence and hope. And so it may have been--so, I fancy, it must have
been--with the tone of our Lord's voice, with the expression of His face.
Did He speak with a frown, or with something like a smile? There must
have been some tenderness, meaningness, pity in His voice which the quick
woman's wit caught instantly, and the quick mother's heart interpreted as
a sign of hope.

Let Him call her a dog if He would. What matter to a mother to be called
a dog, if she could thereby save her child from a devil? Perhaps she was
little better than a dog. They were a bad people these Syrians, quick-
witted, highly civilised, but vicious, and teaching vice to other
nations, till some of the wisest Romans cursed the day when the Syrians
first spread into Rome, and debauched the sturdy Romans with their new-
fangled, foreign sins. They were a bad people, and, perhaps, she had
been as bad as the rest. But if she were a dog, at least she felt that
the dog had found its Master, and must fawn on Him, if it were but for
the hope of getting something from Him.

And so, in the poor heathen mother's heart, there rose up a whole heaven
of perfect humility, faith, adoration. If she were base and mean, yet
our Lord was great, and wise, and good; and that was all the more reason
why He should be magnanimous, generous, condescending, like a true King,
to the basest and meanest of His subjects. She asked not for money, or
honour, or this world's fine things: but simply for her child's health,
her child's deliverance from some mysterious and degrading illness.
Surely there was no harm in asking for that. It was simply a mother's
prayer, a simply human prayer, which our Lord must grant, if He were
indeed a man of woman born, if He had a mother, and could feel for a
mother, if He had human tenderness, human pity in Him. And so, with her
quick Syrian wit, she answers our Lord with those wonderful words--
perhaps the most pathetic words in the whole Bible--so full of humility,
of reverence, and yet with a certain archness, almost playfulness, in
them, as it were, turning our Lord's words against Him; and, by that very
thing, shewing how utterly she trusted Him,--"Truth, Lord: yet the dogs
eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters' tab