The first aspect of it is that which is brought before us in our own Marriage Service. Christ is said to have 'adorned and beautified the holy estate of matrimony with His presence and first miracle that He wrought in Cana of Galilee.' This has been the conclusion at which the reason of the most thoughtful men has arrived, and to which the instinctive feeling in all has responded. If Jesus was the Word made flesh, if the order of the world was established by Him, then His acts upon earth would be done for the purpose of vindicating this order. By them He would claim it as His. By them He would say that it did not belong to the evil one. Marriage, as one of the fundamental parts of this order, as one of the earliest institutes of humanity, as one that had suffered most from abuse, would be one of the first over which He would assert His dominion. And because the ordinance is one in which all are interested, we should look for the assertion to come in some distinct and yet very general way; not, I mean, in a broad proclamation, or in a maxim which is forgotten speedily or frittered away in the application to each individual instance; not again in some case clothed with circumstances that take it out of the common range of cases, not the wedding of a king or of a saint, but one of which every peasant as well as every king might say, 'This tells me to whom _I_ must look to bless my wedlock, because He is the Author of it.' Then, again, that part of the story which refers to the mother of Jesus becomes, I think, clearer when we contemplate it in this light. Romanists are puzzled by it, Protestants exult in it, because it seems to put a kind of slight upon the Virgin. But Protestants and Romanists agree that Jesus had a divine Father and a human mother. If this act was one of the manifestations of Him as the Son of God, can anything be more natural or consistent than that it should be introduced by words which declare that He could not be in subjection to any earthly authority, while yet the act itself was an act of ministry to even the commonest necessities of the sons of earth? Is not this apparent contradiction the accomplishment of His work, the exhibition of Him in His complete character? He will _not_ be the servant of His creatures, not even of His mother; He obeys the Will, which all are created to obey. He _will_ be the servant of His creatures: He is come into the world for that end. He is doing the will of His Father when He is stooping to the lowest of all.