with what intense love and interest they thought
of the parts to be taken by their children in the deliverance God was
preparing. How often they must have pondered the God-inspired saying:
"He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest; and the
Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David; and he
shall reign over the house of Jacob forever; and of his kingdom there
shall be no end." "And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the
Highest: for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his
ways; to give knowledge of salvation unto his people by the remission of
their sins, through the tender mercy of our God; whereby the Dayspring
from on high hath visited us, to give light to them that sit in darkness
and in the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way
of peace."

We think too of a more intimate sympathy that there would have been
between these two women, drawn now so close together, not only by the
blood bond, but by the bond of a common experience. What wonderful
hours of communing during these three months! The peace of the hills of
Judah is all about them and the peace of God is in their souls. What
ecstatic joy, what ineffable love was theirs in these moments as they
thought of the children who were God's precious gift to them. I fancy
that there were many hours when they ceased to think of the mystery that
hung over these children's destiny, and became just mothers lost in love
of the coming sons.

As we try to think out their relation to each other it presents itself
to us as a relation of sympathy. Sympathy is community of feeling; it is
maimed and thwarted when there is feeling only on one side. We speak of
our sympathy in their affliction for others whom we do not know and who
do not know us, but that is a very imperfect rendering of the perfect
thing. No more than love does sympathy reach its perfection in solitude.
But here in this village of Judah we know that we have the perfect
thing--sympathy in its most exquisite form.

This capacity for sympathy is one of the greatest of human endowments,
and, one is glad to think, not like many human endowments, rare in its
manifestation. In its ordinary manifestation it is instinctive, is
roused by the spectacle of need calling us to its aid. There come to our
knowledge from time to time instances of what seem to us very grievous
failures in sympathy, but investigation shows that ignorance is very
commonly a