'_Then said Martha unto Jesus, Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died._' It is the language of reproach; but it is the kind of reproach which has faith and confidence for the ground of it,--which comes from a longing that the person who is the object of it should clear himself, and prove that he has not failed in the office of friendship, however he may have seemed to do so. And then, as if His face had already answered the uneasy suspicion which her words had expressed--had given her a hope of some unknown, inconceivable blessing--she adds, '_But I know that even now, whatsoever thou shalt ask of God, God will give it thee. Jesus saith unto her, Thy brother shall rise again._' The words sound grand and glorious; they were really disappointing. What else she thought He might ask of God she could not say; but it was not _this_. She had heard often of a resurrection; the Jews, who had come to Bethany, had, no doubt, been telling her many good discourses of the elders concerning it. Ages hence he would, she thought, awake out of the dust; in the meantime, the light in their house had been quenched; he was gone from them. She said, '_I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day. Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live._' If He intended to give back Lazarus to her at once, could He not have told her so? Might He not have said, 'In thy special case, for my love to Lazarus and Mary and thee, I am about to break through ordinary laws, and to raise a body out of the grave,--not at the last day, but now.' Why not? Because, if He had said so, He would have contradicted His own words, His own acts, the whole tenor of His life. He did not come into the world to show special favours, but to assert and manifest universal truth. He did not come into the world to break God's laws, but to establish them, and to show forth the will which was at the foundation of them. Therefore, instead of limiting Martha's words about a resurrection in the last day, He expanded her words,--He uttered what was a _more_ general proposition than that one,--not bounded to a certain moment in the future, but extending over the present and the past. The resurrection in the last day,--vague and loose as Martha's thoughts were about it,--was still practically bounded by the feeling which occupied her soul in that hour. 'I know that _my brother_ shall rise again,' did not mean very much to her; the rising of any besides her brother meant nothing. But '_I am the resurrection and the life_,' were words that applied to herself as much as to Lazarus,--to her sister as much as to either. She could not apprehend them, even in the slightest degree, without feeling that they were spoken of _human_ beings,--not merely of that being who had been lying in the grave four days. And yet how immeasurably more they met her own case, her own