ith ourselves. But with Christ it is different:
we miss those sensible impressions made upon us by the living bodily
presence; we find it difficult to retain in the mind a settled idea of
the feeling He has towards us. It is an effort to accomplish by faith
what sight without any effort effectually accomplishes. We do not _see_
that He loves us; the looks and tones that chiefly reveal human love are
absent; we are not from hour to hour confronted, whether we will or no,
with one evidence or other of love. Were the life of a Christian
nowadays no more difficult than it was to Mary, were it brightened with
Christ's presence as a household friend, were the whole sum and
substance of it merely a giving way to the love He kindled by palpable
favours and measurable friendship, then surely the Christian life would
be a very simple, very easy, very happy course.

But the connection between ourselves and Christ is not of the body that
passes, but of the spirit which endures. It is spiritual, and such a
connection may be seriously perverted by the interference of sense and
of bodily sensations. To measure the love of Christ by His expression of
face and by His tone of voice is legitimate, but it is not the truest
measurement: to be drawn to Him by the accidental kindnesses our present
difficulties must provoke is to be drawn by something short of perfect
spiritual affinity. And, on the whole, it is well that our spirit should
be allowed to choose its eternal friendship and alliance by what is
specially and exclusively its own, so that its choice cannot be
mistaken, as the choice sometimes is when there is a mixture of physical
and spiritual attractiveness. So much are we guided in youth and in the
whole of our life by what is material, so freely do we allow our tastes
to be determined and our character to be formed by our connection with
what is material, that the whole man gets blunted in his _spiritual_
perceptions and incapable of appreciating what is not seen. And the
great part of our education in this life is to lift the spirit to its
true place and to its appropriate company, to teach it to measure its
gains apart from material prosperity, and to train it to love with
ardour what cannot be seen.

Besides, it cannot be doubted that this incident itself very plainly
teaches that Christ came into this world to win our love and to turn all
duty into a personal acting towards Him; to make the _whole_ of life
like those parts o