illed with the wrecks and skeletons of breathing men
and animated frames!

The triumphs of death are, in ordinary circumstances, to us scarcely
perceptible. He moves with noiseless tread. The footprint is made on the
sands of time; but like the tides of the ocean, the world's
oblivion-power washes it away. The name of yonder churchyard is "the
_land of forgetfulness_!" Not so with the Lord of Life, the great
Antagonist of this usurper! The future, a ghastly future, rose in
appalling vividness before Him.--Death (vulture-like) flapping his wings
over the multitudes he claimed as his own,--vessels freighted with
immortality lying wrecked and stranded on the shores of Time!

Yes! we can only understand the full import of these tears of Jesus, as
we imagine to ourselves His Godlike eye penetrating at that moment every
churchyard and every grave: the mausoleums of the great--the grassy sods
of the poor; the marble cenotaph of the noble and illustrious slumbering
under fretted aisle and cathedral canopy--the myriads whose requiem is
chanted by the bleak winds of the desert or the chimes of the ocean! The
child carried away in the twinkling of an eye--the blossom just opening,
and then frost-blighted; the aged sire, cut down like a shock of corn in
its season, falling withered and seared like the leaves of autumn; the
young exulting in the prime of manhood; the pious and benevolent, the
great and good, succumbing indiscriminately to the same inexorable
decree; the erring and thoughtless, reckless of all warning, hurried
away in the midst of scorned mercy--Oh! as He beheld this ghastly
funeral procession moving before Him, the whole world going to the same
long home, and He Himself alone left the survivor, can we wonder that
_Jesus wept_?

(3.) Once more, JESUS WEPT _when He thought of the impenitence and
obduracy of the human heart_.

This may not be at first sight patent as a cause of the tears of Jesus,
but we may well believe it entered largely as an element into this
strange flood of sorrow.

He was about to perform a great (His greatest) miracle; but while He
knew that, in consequence of this manifestation of His mighty power,
many of those who now stood around Lazarus' tomb would _believe_, He
knew also that others would only "despise, and wonder, and perish;" that
while some, as we shall afterwards find, acknowledged Him as the
Messiah, others went straightway into Jerusalem to concert with the
Pharisees in plot