tempt to increase the feminine interest all through. The slight lead
given by Mark is taken up and developed. More is said about Jesus's
mother and her feelings. Christ's following of women, just mentioned by
Mark to account for their presence at his tomb, is introduced earlier;
and some of the women are named; so that we are introduced to Joanna the
wife of Chuza, Herod's steward, and Susanna. There is the quaint little
domestic episode between Mary and Martha. There is the parable of the
Prodigal Son, appealing to the indulgence romance has always shown to
Charles Surface and Des Grieux. Women follow Jesus to the cross; and he
makes them a speech beginning "Daughters of Jerusalem." Slight as these
changes may seem, they make a great change in the atmosphere. The Christ
of Matthew could never have become what is vulgarly called a woman's
hero (though the truth is that the popular demand for sentiment, as far
as it is not simply human, is more manly than womanly); but the Christ
of Luke has made possible those pictures which now hang in many ladies'
chambers, in which Jesus is represented exactly as he is represented
in the Lourdes cinematograph, by a handsome actor. The only touch of
realism which Luke does not instinctively suppress for the sake of
producing this kind of amenity is the reproach addressed to Jesus for
sitting down to table without washing his hands; and that is retained
because an interesting discourse hangs on it.

WAITING FOR THE MESSIAH.

Another new feature in Luke's story is that it begins in a world in
which everyone is expecting the advent of the Christ. In Matthew and
Mark, Jesus comes into a normal Philistine world like our own of today.
Not until the Baptist foretells that one greater than himself shall come
after him does the old Jewish hope of a Messiah begin to stir again; and
as Jesus begins as a disciple of John, and is baptized by him, nobody
connects him with that hope until Peter has the sudden inspiration which
produces so startling an effect on Jesus. But in Luke's gospel men's
minds, and especially women's minds, are full of eager expectation of a
Christ not only before the birth of Jesus, but before the birth of John
the Baptist, the event with which Luke begins his story. Whilst Jesus
and John are still in their mothers' wombs, John leaps at the approach
of Jesus when the two mothers visit one another. At the circumcision of
Jesus pious men and women hail the infant as the