loving; so reluctant to endure hardness, with views of life and aims so opposed to His; so unable to keep a pure and elevated purpose steadfastly in my mind.” Mary was once trodden under foot of evil, a wreck in whom none but Christ saw any place for hope. It is what is in _Him_ that is powerful. He has won His supremacy by love, by refusing to enjoy His private rights without our sharing them; and He maintains His supremacy by love, teaching all to love Him, subduing to devotedness the hardest heart—not by a remote exhibition of cold, unemotional perfection, but by the persistence and depth of His warm and individual love. Mary had no time to reason and doubt. With one quick exclamation of ecstatic recognition and joy she sprang towards Him. The one word “my Master,”[30] uttered all her heart. It is related of George Herbert that when he was inducted into the cure of Bemerton he said to a friend: “I beseech God that my humble and charitable life may so win upon others as to bring glory to my Jesus, whom I have this day taken to be my Master and my Governor, and I am so proud of His service that I will always call Him Jesus, my Master.” His biographer adds: “He seems to rejoice in that word Jesus, and says that the adding these words ‘my Master’ to it and the often repetition of them seemed to perfume his mind.” With Mary the title was one of indefinite respect; she found in Jesus one she could always reverence and trust. The firm, loving hand that admits no soft evasion of duty; the steadfast step that with equanimity ever goes straight forward; the strong heart that has always room for the distresses of others; the union with God which made Him a medium to earth of God’s superiority and availing compassion,—these things had made the words “my Master” His proper designation in her lips. And our spirit cannot be purified and elevated but by worthy love and deserved reverence, by living in presence of that which commands our love and lifts up our nature to what is above it. It is by letting our heart and mind be filled by what is above us that we grow in abiding stature and become in our turn helpful to what is at a still lower stage than we are.