He, the Great Sun of the World--the Sun of Righteousness, was to set in a few brief days behind the walls of ungrateful Jerusalem in darkness and blood--His last rays seem now lingering over the crest of Olivet--His tears seem to tell that He has clung till He can cling no more to the fond hope that an impenitent nation and guilty city will yet turn at His reproof, believe and live. And still does He linger among _us_. Though the night cometh, the beams of mercy are still tardily lingering, as if loth to leave the backsliding to their wanderings, or the impenitent to their own midnight of despair. O Reader! leave not _this_ subject--leave not the graveyard of Bethany till you think of Jesus as then weeping for _thee_. Yes! for _thee_--thy pitiable condition--thy perverse ingratitude--thy slighting of His warnings--thy grieving of His spirit--thy unkindness to _Him_--thine obstinate disregard of thine own everlasting interests. Let it be the most wondrous and heart-searching of all the memories of Bethany, that for thy soul--that traitor, truant, worthless soul--which like a stray planet He might have suffered to drift away from Himself into the blackness of eternal darkness--helpless, hopeless, ruined, lost!--Yes! that for _thee_, JESUS WEPT! "And doth the Saviour weep Over His people's sin, Because we will not let Him keep The souls He died to win? Ye hearts that love the Lord, If at this sight ye burn, See that in thought, in deed, in word, Ye hate what made Him mourn." XIII. THE GRAVE STONE. They have now reached the grave. It was a rocky sepulchre. A flat stone (possibly with some Hebrew inscription) lay upon the mouth of it. In wondering amazement the sorrowing group follow the footsteps of the Saviour. "Behold how He loved him," whisper the Jews to one another as they witness His fast falling tears. Can His repairing thus to the tomb be anything more than to pay a mournful tribute to an honoured friendship, and behold the silent home of the loved dead? Nay; He is about, as the Lord of Life, to wrench away the swaddling-bands of corruption, to vindicate His name and prerogative as the "Abolisher of death"--to have the first-fruits of that vast triumph which, ages before the birth of time, He had anticipated with longing earnestness--"I will ransom them from the power of the grave, I will redeem them from death. O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, I will be thy destruction." Does He proceed forthwith to speak the word, and to accomplish the giant deed? He breaks silence. But we listen, in the first instance, not to the omnipotent summons, but to an address to the bystanders--"_Jesus said, Take ye away the stone!_"[15]