the whole world, and lets his heart overflow:--St Matthew alone
has saved for us the eternal cry:--'Come unto me all ye that labour and
are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.'--'I know the Father; come
then to me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden.' He does not here
call those who want to know the Father; his cry goes far beyond them; it
reaches to the ends of the earth. He calls those who are weary; those
who do not know that ignorance of the Father is the cause of all their
labour and the heaviness of their burden. 'Come unto me,' he says, 'and
I will give you rest.'

This is the Lord's own form of his gospel, more intensely personal and
direct, at the same time of yet wider inclusion, than that which, at
Nazareth, he appropriated from Isaiah; differing from it also in this,
that it is interfused with strongest persuasion to the troubled to enter
into and share his own eternal rest. I will turn his argument a little.
'I have rest because I know the Father. Be meek and lowly of heart
toward him as I am; let him lay his yoke upon you as he lays it on me. I
do his will, not my own. Take on you the yoke that I wear; be his child
like me; become a babe to whom he can reveal his wonders. Then shall you
too find rest to your souls; you shall have the same peace I have; you
will be weary and heavy laden no more. I find my yoke easy, my burden
light.'

We must not imagine that, when the Lord says, 'Take my yoke upon you,'
he means a yoke which he lays on those that come to him; 'my yoke' is
the yoke he wears himself, the yoke his father lays upon him, the yoke
out of which, that same moment, he speaks, bearing it with glad
patience. 'You must take on you the yoke I have taken: the Father lays
it upon us.'

The best of the good wine remains; I have kept it to the last. A friend
pointed out to me that the Master does not mean we must take on us a
yoke like his; we must take on us the very yoke he is carrying.

Dante, describing how, on the first terrace of Purgatory, he walked
stooping, to be on a level with Oderisi, who went bowed to the ground by
the ponderous burden of the pride he had cherished on earth, says--'I
went walking with this heavy-laden soul, just as oxen walk in the yoke':
this picture almost always comes to me with the words of the Lord, 'Take
my yoke upon you, and learn of me.' Their intent is, 'Take the other end
of my yoke, doing as I do, being as I am.' Think of it a moment:--to
walk in the sam