t presence still? Earthly sympathy is not to be despised; nay, when
death has entered a household, taken the dearest and the best and laid
them in the tomb, nothing is more soothing to the wounded, crushed, and
broken one, than to experience the genial sympathy of true Christian
friendship. Those, it may be, little known before (comparative
strangers), touched with the story of a neighbour's sorrow, come to
offer their tribute of condolence, and to "weep with those that weep."
Never is _true_ friendship so tested as then. Hollow attachments, which
have nothing but the world or a time of prosperity to bind them,
discover their worthlessness. "Summer friends" stand aloof--they have
little patience for the sadness of sorrow's countenance and the funereal
trappings of the death-chamber; while sympathy, based on lofty Christian
principle, loves to minister as a subordinate healer of the
broken-hearted, and to indulge in a hundred nameless ingenious offices
of kindness and love.

_But_ "thus far shalt thou go, and no farther." The purest and noblest
and most disinterested of earthly friends can only go a certain way.
Their minds and sympathies are limited. They cannot enter into the deep
recesses of the smitten heart--the yawning crevices that bereavement has
laid bare. _But_ JESUS _can_! Ah! there are capacities and sensibilities
in that Mighty Heart that can probe the deepest wound and gauge the
profoundest sorrow. While from the _best_ of earthly comforters the mind
turns away unsatisfied; while the burial-ground and the grave only
recall the deep humiliations of the body's wreck and ruin--with what
fond emotion does the spirit, like Mary, turn to Him who possesses the
majesty of Deity with all the tenderness of humanity. The Mighty Lord,
and yet the Elder Brother!

The sympathy of man is often selfish, formal, constrained, commonplace,
coming more from the surface than from the depths of the heart. It is
the finite sympathy of a finite creature. The Redeemer's sympathy is
that of the perfect Man and the infinite God--able to enter into all the
peculiarities of the case--all the tender features and shadings of
sorrow which are hidden from the keenest and kindliest _human_ eye.

Mary's procedure is a true type and picture of what the broken heart of
the Christian feels. Not undervaluing human sympathy, yet, nevertheless,
all the crowd of sympathising friends--Jewish citizens, Bethany
villagers--are nothing to her when she