Ah! surely no cause could more tenderly elicit a Redeemer's tears than _this_--the thought of His Redemption scorned, His blood trampled on, His work set at nought. If we have thought of Him shedding tears over the ruin of the _body_, what must have been the depth and intensity of those tears over the sadder, more fearful ruin of the soul? Immortal powers, that ought to have been ennobled and consecrated to His service, alienated, degraded, destroyed!--immortal beings spurning from them the day of grace and the hopes of heaven! Bitter as may have been the wail of mourning and sorrowing hearts that may then have reached His ear from future ages, more agonising and dismal far must have been the wailing cry which, beyond the limits of time, came floating up from a dark and dreary eternity; those who might have believed and lived, but who blasphemed or trifled, neglected and procrastinated, and finally perished! If we think of it, it is not the loss of health, or the loss of wealth, or the loss of friends, which forms the heaviest of trials, the deepest ground of soul sadness. _We_ put on the sable attire as emblems of mourning; but if we saw it as a weeping Jesus sees it, there is more real cause for sackcloth and ashes in the heart at enmity with God, and despising His salvation, trampling under foot His Son, and enacting over again the sad tragedy of Calvary. Reader! are you at this moment guilty of living on in a state of presumptuous impenitence--salvation unsought--Jesus a stranger--His name unhonoured--His Bible unread--His promises unappropriated--His wrath undreaded--defeating all His marvellous appliances of love, and remonstrance, and forbearance--meeting a prodigal expenditure of patience and long-suffering with cold and chilling indifference and neglect--casting away from you the hoarded riches of eternity which He has been holding out for your acceptance? In that sacred Bethany ground, as ye mark these falling tear-drops which dim His eye, there may have been a tear for _you_! Eighteen hundred years have since elapsed, but He to whom "a thousand years are as one day," marked even _then_ your present ungrateful apostacy or guilty alienation--there was a tear then which stole down that cheek on account of unrequited love? Is that tear to flow in vain? Are you to mock His tender sympathy still with cold formalism, or persisted-in impenitency? Are you to think of Bethany and its tear-drops and still go on in sin? Ah, never was sermon preached to an erring or impenitent sinner half so eloquent as _this_. Paul was not given to weeping, and it makes his fervid love of souls all the more striking when we find him confessing that he had wept like a child over those who were "enemies to the cross of Christ." We have often felt Paul's burning tears over hardened sinners to be touching and impressive. But what are they, after all, in comparison with those of Paul's Lord?