“Well, I may be wrong, but the deepest outcome of friendship seems to me, on the part of the superior at least, the permission, or better still, the call, to share in his sufferings. And in saying that hard word to the poor Gentile, our Lord honoured her thus mightily. He assumed for the moment the part of the Jew towards the Gentile, that he might, for the sake of all the world of Gentiles and Jews, lay bare to his Jewish followers the manner of spirit they were of, and let them see what a lovely humanity they despised in their pride of election. He took her to suffer with him for the salvation of the world. The cloud overshadowed them both, but what words immediately thereafter made a glory in her heart! He spoke to her as if her very faith had reached an arm into the heavens, and brought therefrom the thing she sought.--But I confess,” the curate went on, “those two passages have both troubled me. So I presume will everything that is God’s, until it becomes a strength and a light by revealing its true nature to the heart that has grown capable of understanding it. The first sign of the coming capacity and the coming joy, is the anxiety and the question.--There is another passage, which, although it does not trouble me so much, I cannot yet get a right perception of. When Mary Magdalene took the Master of Death for the gardener--the gardener of the garden of the tombs! no great mistake, was it?--it is a lovely thing, that mistaking of Jesus for the gardener!--how the holy and the lowly, yea the holy and the common meet on all sides! Just listen to their morning talk--the morning of the eternal open world to Jesus, while the shadows of this narrow life still clustered around Mary:--I can give it you exactly, for I was reading it this very day. “‘Woman, why weepest thou? Whom seekest thou?’ “‘Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away.’ “‘Mary.’ “‘Master!’ “‘Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father and your Father; and to my God and your God.’