"I'll box your ears in a minute, Kitty," put in Belle, looking up from her accounts. "I am married to the village, I think. It takes up all the time I can spare from Granny." "I wish I could see Belle happily married, it would make me very happy," continued Granny, not heeding the interruption. "I should never be happy away from this place; and I would not leave you for any one in the world, Granny." "No, Belle, you shall never leave me; but I should like you to marry some one who would come and live here. I wish Mr. Thorn and you had fallen in love with each other; you could both have lived here." "So do I, Granny," said Kitty, gravely. "I suppose he will be back soon. How I should like to meet him! I cannot bear the prospect of not seeing him again. Jim and I have so often talked of him, and we downright love him." "He often writes to Belle about the village, and all that concerns it," said Granny, "but he seldom says anything about himself; but we know he must return some time this week." "And we go to-morrow, Granny. Did I tell you that Hester Cooper has a little girl? such a pretty little thing! How that girl has altered! Joe has done it, and then she was so sorry for the trouble her falsehood cost every one. It is quite wonderful to see the change in her; and she looks you straight in the face now. It is a great blessing when a woman marries an upright, straightforward fellow like Joe. She was quite pleased to hear of Alfred Woodruffe's marriage. Here comes my Jim over the meadow, and I promised to go and stroll about with him. Good-bye, Granny, we'll be back in an hour." "How happy that child is!" said Granny; and then she leant back in her chair, and dozed, for talking always fatigued her, and Belle went and stood by the open French window, and looked out at the garden, and the thick trees that hid the meadow -"Kitty's meadow"-beyond, and at the spire of the little church beyond. "I hope I shall spend all my life here," she said, "seeing the people who are young grow old, and hearing the little peal of St. Luke's Sunday after Sunday. I am so content," and she looked up at the clear blue sky, and back for a moment at Granny, and sent up a silent prayer of thankfulness. Then she heard the click of the garden gate, and a moment afterwards saw a figure coming up the pathway. She gave a start, and the colour dyed her face crimson for a moment, and then she went gently down the pathway, and met Laurence Thorn half way. "So you have come home," she said; "welcome, so heartily! They strolled round the garden, and talked. It was a pity to disturb Granny, he said, and it was so pleasant to hear about all the people he knew, though your letters have kept me well informed. They have been such a comfort to me, Belle." "Have they," she answered, and she looked up at him, with happiness on her face-that face that had taken peace and comfort into many and many a village home, and had taught the story of Christ so lovingly, that many had listened (if not for its own sake) to gain the wondrous charm and content it had sent into her pure life, until they learnt to take it to their hearts as she had taken it to hers. Laurence Thorn looked down at the face now, a long refreshing look, and then turned away as one turns from some fair picture. "Annie was right; her face is not so bright and pretty as Kitty's was, but it is the sweetest and purest I ever saw. She is a very beautiful woman." And he who had come back doubting and fearing himself, felt content and thankful that he had found his home again. EVENINGS IN THE BETHANY HOME. BY THE REV. W. BOYD CARPENTER, M.A., VICAR OF ST. JAMES'S, HOLLOWAY. E are made for joy. Pain, sorrow, bereavement, have their disciplining value. Tribulation works experience. But there is a feeling which prompts us to say suffering and grief are not our primal heritage; we were born for joy. Afflictions are but transient-they are the nightmare of this dream-life. So writes the Psalmist. Sorrow may come in as a passing guest to spend the night, but a shout of gladness rises with the sun. Sorrow may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning. The sisters at Bethany found this. The cloud lifted, and behind it was the smiling face of heavenly love. Wisdom, goodness, power, had been working in the hands of Christ for their welfare. Everything contributed to intensify their gladness. They have their brother given back from death, and from a double death. They have learned to take a new step in the life of faith. They have had a fresh revealing of the character of their Master, Christ. This, then, is their joy. They know more of him; they have fuller knowledge of spiritual principles; they have a firmer possession of their long-loved brother. On hearing of the sickness of one so loved as Lazarus, the suggestion of the heart would be to go at once to his bed-side. We cannot suppose that this yearning of the heart was not experienced by our Lord, but His love is one which, as it is wise and kind, seeks not the gratification of the impulse, but the highest and best good of the loved one. So, when Christ heard of the sickness, He abode where He was two days. He saw in the futur and in the present also that this delay was to be fraught with untold blessings to all concerned. Love, a higher love, because a wiser and more self-denying love, showed itself in self-command. But when the fitting time came-when those two days of wise delay were passed-then the courageousness of Christ's love appeared. The time was one of more than ordinary danger. The animosity of the Jews had reached the stage of open violence. But recently the Jews had sought to stone Him; but when love sees her way to fulfil her high and sacred duty, danger will not stay her; still less can threatened peril or friendly remonstrances hold back from His path of kindness Him whose name was love. And this courage has its foundation in a deep and calm reliance on God's guiding 1. They have learned more of the character of and protecting hand. In many of the greatest of their Master, Christ. Every event in life is a kind of crisis which tests our characters. The most trivial incidents are enough to bring to light our strength of will, our powers of judgment, our presence of mind. It is thus constantly true that "the man is proven by the hour." The Evangelists in their simple narrative enable us to see, in such circumstances as this sickness, death, and raising again of Lazarus, the fair and fresh features of our Master's character. We may see how to the sisters at Bethany was unfolded the self-command, the courage, the calmness, the patience, and the sympathy of Jesus Christ. Self-command controls the impulse of affection. earth's sons there has been a strong confidence in their destiny. Till their work was done they felt they could pass scatheless among dangers. A like high confidence Christ shows, but it is tinged by no gloomy fatalism, it is the cheerful, calm repose of trust in the God who gives His angels charge over us to keep us in all our ways. When urged by His disciples not to venture again into the region where His life had been threatened, He answers that to every one there is assigned a work to do, and a time in which to do it; and that as long as He is doing that work in the clear light of duty and of God, He is safe, till the eventide when God shall call him home; that only those are insecure who are groping onward in out. ways where the light of duty and of God shines "Are there not twelve hours in the day? If any man walk in the day he stumbleth not, because he seeth the light of this world. But if a man walk in the night he stumbleth, because there is no light in him." His is the calm confidence, that wherever His work calls Him there He must go, and can go with entire safety. As on this way He sees His Father always before Him, so He knows that the same Father is at His right, and therefore He is not moved in mind, and from His purpose, of going where love and truth are calling Him. There is more than the virtue of a strong character to be seen in Christ. We do not usually look for tenderness or patience allied with firmness and self-control. We look to the weaker characters in life for the tenderer and more womanly virtues. In Christ we find all the strength of self-command, the readiness of loving patience, and the exquisiteness of utter sympathy. He who can resist the promptings of the heart to go to the bed-side of Lazarus, who can face peril rather than flinch from duty, when He meets with Martha is entle, patient, sympathising as a woman. Note now carefully He enters into her thoughts, and how gently He seeks to lead her mind to see the higher truths of the spiritual world! See how completely He identifies Himself with the vast sorrow of the multitude, and the separate sadness of the sisters' hearts! This is, indeed, perfect God and perfect man, who is strong to help us wisely, and tender to feel for us lovingly. In His life on earth He sighs, He groans, He weeps! He is very man; He is touched by the wondrous feeling which gives a people's sorrow power to draw all hearts with it. When He sees the multitude moved with grief He weeps with them. But He sees more, and suffers more in His wider range of vision; for much knowledge increases sorrow. Naturally it is so, for knowledge enables us to see round the sorrow, and understand its full import. The death of the head of a family is to the little child the missing of one familiar form. Those who have had wider knowledge of the world see that it is far more than a gap in the circle of love it is the fall of a column on which the roof has rested. And Christ saw further than the most enlarged experience of men. Every sorrow stood out before Him as the symptoms of wider evils and more terrible misfortunes. He could see all round it, and estimate its real proportions, and its deep significance. To Him, therefore, this death, this fierce ordeal of pain and bereavement, was the measure of the giant powers of that moral evil which called for so sharp a remedy. He saw, too, what strengths of enmity His very act of mercy could not fail to rouse in the breasts of those who envied His success, and hated Him for His holi ness; that the miracle of power and goodnesswhich to ingenuous minds might have carried conviction-would only harden the hearts and intensify the malignity of His foes. No wonder then that He should weep and groan. His pure and loving nature, calm, self-controlled, courageous, and full of an infinite tenderness, comes before us in this scene, and we know Him as Martha and Mary must have known Him, as the one who is strength, firmness, and fidelity, as well as in gentleness and love, is suited to be our Friend, our Counsellor, our Master. To us, as to the sisters, "The Master is come, and calleth." 2. The sisters have learned more of spiritual truth. There are few things which so much try the mind and heart as suspense. To be compelled to wait from day to day in uncertainty, half expecting some promised blessing, and half fearing that after all it may never come, to be kept with nerves and feeling and senses on the stretch, and to know with a sinking heart what tremendous issues hang on the result, is a strain before which even the strongest men give way. This had been the trial of the sisters at Bethany. Through six days at least their anxiety must have been protracted, for besides the two days of Christ's delay before starting, there were the two days occupied by His journey to Bethany, and to these must be added two days which we may suppose the messenger from the sisters took on his way to tell Jesus of the sickness of Lazarus. During six days their suspense lasted, and no word came from Christ. We say no word came from Christ, and yet it may have been that the messenger reported to Martha and Mary what Christ had said, and if so a very painful perplexity and conflict must have possessed their minds. Let us try and realise this. As soon as the sickness appeared to be dangerous the messenger had been dispatched, for we may be sure that no time was lost by the sisters in communicating with Jesus. If, as has been conjectured, the sickness was one of the sharp and swiftly fatal fevers of the East, the symptoms would have been recognised at once, and the messenger be despatched immediately. Urged by the grief and earnestness of the sisters, he would travel perhaps quicker than Christ and His disciples were journeying to Bethany; but against this we must set the fact that he would in all probability lose a little time in inquiring for the exact spot where Christ was to be found. Where he delivers the message, "Lord, he whom Thou lovest is sick," the only words Christ utters are words which would be interpreted to mean that Lazarus would recover. "This sickness," our Lord said, "is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby" (John xi. 4). No other words, so far as we know, EVENINGS IN THE BETHANY HOME. were spoken, and if these were spoken in the hearing of the messenger they could hardly have failed to have suggested the thought that Lazarus was to recover. With this idea in his mind, he hurried back to Bethany, but reached it to find that Lazarus was dead, and on inquiry to learn that he had expired at the very moment that Christ had said, "This sickness is not unto death." If he related Christ's words to the sisters, how terribly afflicting must have been their feelings! They might go and look at the tomb, for in all probability Lazarus was buried within twenty-four hours of his death, and, looking at it, the words would ring in their ears, This sickness is not unto death." Not unto death! what is death then, if this is not death? The breath has passed, the eyes have closed, the pulse has ceased, the grave has shut her mouth upon him. Yet He who spake truth, He who was too kind to hold out false hopes, had said, "This sickness is not unto death." If too kind to deceive, could He then have made a mistake? Had He mis-reckoned His powers? Was He feebler than they supposed? Or had He forgotten? Or did He mean some other thing, which they could not comprehend? Altogether it was most perplexing; doubts and misgivings are abroad in their minds. But as they are troubled -troubled at their loss, troubled by the strange presence of death in their house, troubled by the still stranger absence of Him they loved in the hour of their need-Jesus himself is drawing near; He is climbing, with His disciples, the slopes which lead up to the village; He is coming, and He has love and teaching for the sad and the puzzled, hope for the living and the dead. We shall see that He has teaching for Martha. She, true to her character, had stepped out to meet Christ as soon as she heard that He was coming. Her mind is full of conflicting feelings. She feels a little half-resentful at the delay, yet the feeling is dying out in the calm lovingness of Christ's presence. He disarms by His gentleness the sting of the reproachful feeling--" If thou hadst been here," &c. But other thoughts are awake in Martha's mind. Is it all too late? Has the closing of the grave an irrevocable power in it? Is there not something-she hardly dares trust herself to think what-something that may yet be done? I know that even now, whatsoever Thou wilt ask of God, God will give it thee." Has she faith that can rise to this high level? or is it only the expression of a vague, half-formed hope? Whatever was the character of the feeling or the thought in her mind at the moment, the answer was simple, explicit, and consoling. "Thy brother shall rise again." The clear words of Christ, instead of raising her confidence, revealed the instability or the want of definiteness of her faith. She falls back upon an old formula, embodying a 66 823 truth, but not the truth to which Christ was leading her mind. "I know," she says, "that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day." She is thinking of the physical restoration in the far-distant hereafter, which was part of the Pharisaic creed, held strongly against the Sadducee. Christ is leading her mind to a nobler restoration - a restoration which is immediate and endless. For even if Lazarus were given back from the grave, yet the pain of separation must be repeated. Christ would have her grasp that nobler truth, that those who have tasted the power of the spiritual resurrection in Him have a brotherhood with each other which scorns death, because their fellowship is one which death cannot touch, much less destroy. So He speaks of this truth. "I am the resurrection and the life. He who believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and he that liveth and believeth in Me shall never die." There is a life, He seems to say, which is independent of death, and which is nobler than the life which we live here, it is a life of faith in Him who is the life indeed, and the resurrection from the grave of sin. But Martha cannot follow Him. Perhaps the excitement of the last few days, the fatigue of body, and the distressing conflict of mind, have benumbed her powers, and made her all too weary to understand, yet she can trust. So, when Christ asks, "Believest thou this?" her answer seems to be, "I cannot follow all this, but I can trust in Thee, as the fulfilment of all our ancient hopes." Yet the lesson has been taught, and when the grave is opened, and Lazarus is given back, and she finds him more than a brother beloved, a brother in a high and holy faith, she will then perceive what life it is which rises strong above the fear of death, and triumphs over the separation of the grave in the might of Christ the Life. Thus Mary, as well as Martha, meet in their bitter trial and glorious restoration the seeds which in heart and life will blossom into fair flowers of hope and joy for evermore, and show them how much the Master can teach in the school of vicissitude and sorrow. 3. The discipline is for Lazarus also. "This sickness," said Christ, "is not unto death." To physical death it certainly was; but our Lord throughout spoke that double language of spiritual analogy which is so plain and expressive to us. In the higher view of human things, the death to be dreaded is not the death which lays the body asleep in the tomb, but that death which makes the body the sepulchre of a dead soul. The sickness and the death were to form the portals through which the spirit of Lazarus was to pass from the death of sin to the life of righteousness. The brother was to rise again, now twice a brother in the flesh and in the Lord. Wondrously well did that physical death and its drear accompaniments express the state of the world-buried heart. Between him and the brighter and better life stood the impediment of the love of things earthly. The one love he could not part with for Christ's sake-the love of earth's possessions-lay like the stone which closed the door of the sepulchre. This must be removed ere the dead can come forth. The sin which besets us, which enlists our affection and detains us from Christ, must be parted with before His voice can speak us into new life; for we are not really ready to follow Him till we have renounced that which keeps us from Him. But all within the heart is dead, and the growth of long habits of sin have wound strong fetters round us. Dead is the heart to the fair things of God, dead to the life that is in Him, and the holiness which He demands, and more than dead, enslaved also. For sin does more than pollute, it blinds the vision and shackles the will. Even when the dead comes forth, his face is bound, and his feet and hands are wrapped in the grave-clothes. The process of evil gaining on the heart closes the eyes to wrong. Things which we once thought and felt to be sinful are looked on, and no harm is seen in them; the eye for right and wrong is bound about by the busy hands of eager desire and sinful inclination. It is the first step to a worse bondage. The hand once quick for good, the foot once swift to kindness, are tied in useless inactivity. From all this darkness and hopelessness Christ comes to set us free. No voice but His is potent over such a state of death, but He is the resurrection. He stands before the sepulchre, and cries, and His voice pierces the sin-dulled ears, and wakens to new pulsations the stone-dead heart. Lazarus comes forth to a new life, twice restored, to the sight of the groves of Olivet and the familiar faces of home, and to the sight of new duties, new powers, new desires, and of a Saviour and Redeemer, who is Lord of his life for ever. This is the fruit of his discipline. With two thoughts we may close. It 1. Christ often gives by seeming to refuse. is the part of faith to have trust in the wisdom of God. Impatience forfeits the blessings God designs to give; for it cannot see in the apparent refusal of its first petitions the pledge of a better gift to be bestowed. But faith is patient, and receives in ways blessings far nobler than she dreamed of. To the sisters Christ seemed for a while to refuse. Lazarus was left to die; but how much richer was the boon Christ gave than that for which they asked. They asked restoration from sickness, He gave them life from the dead; they asked the recovery of his bodily health, He gave them a brother disenthralled and new-created in spirit. Will He not do the same with us, and give us more than we think of? We ask for peace, for rest, for forgiveness, we meet with conflict, toil, and perhaps deep heart misgivings, but in them He shows us Himself, our captain in conflict, our strength in labour, our peace in the struggles of conscience. This is better, for then we learn to know more of Him, and more of self, and more of those trials which afflict our brethren which are in the world. Let us learn it, let us settle it as a truth never to be gainsayed, that Christ never withholds a boon but because He means to give a better. If He does not give us health for our sick ones, He will give heart-healing; if He does not give life, He will give immortality; if He does not give success, He will give the crown of life which fadeth not away. 2. Christ means to perpetuate our joys. We come back to the point from which we started. Our instinct, our feelings, our hopes, all claim joy, not sorrow, as our portion. Christ sets His seal to these aspirations. Sorrow is but for a time, joy is for ever. He will set the impress of immortal power upon all the innocent and farreaching wishes of our hearts. This the close of the incident teaches us, for the broken home is made one again, the gap they mourned over is filled, the joy of the sisters is complete, for Lazarus is there, and Christ is there. Martha can go joyfully about her toil again. Mary can sit once more at Jesus' feet, and glance with untold gladness now at her restored brother, now at the Redeemer. "Her eyes are homes of silent prayer, Nor other thought her mind admits- All other, where her ardent gaze And what is all this but a sweet prophecy of the joys that remain for the people of God? Sorrow enters our doors now, but let us remember she is only a guest come to tarry with us for the nighttime of life. Let us treat her with the courtesy due to a guest, though her presence be irksome and her manners rough. Her elder sister, Joy, will greet us when the morning breaks over the shore of God's fair land. She will take us by the hand and set us in our Father's home, where the many mansions are, and we shall be glad indeed; for no sorrow shall be there, no sighing, no tears; and our loved ones will be there, and He who loved us and gave Himself for us, who was dead and is now alive, will be there; and from that sunny home we shall go out no more. |