on things on the earth. For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life shall appear, then shall ye also appear with Him in glory!"

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SERMON XIII.

ST. JOHN Xi. 33-35.-"When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews also weeping which came with her, he groaned in the spirit, and was troubled, and said, Where have ye laid him? They say unto him, Lord, come and see. JESUS WEPT."

THERE is something not only affecting but wonderfully mysterious in this! And though the whole of the solemn and heart-touching narrative of which this weeping of Jesus forms a part, is familiar to us from our infancy, yet the more we read it, and think of it, and try to throw ourselves into the depths of it, the more the marvel grows, the less we comprehend it.

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First, it is strange that Jesus should weep at all! For though He was clothed in human flesh, and with the countenance of man, He was very God of very God," co-eternal with the infinite Father, filling heaven and earth with his presence. Nay, at that very moment, though his feet trod the ground, and men pressed and touched the bodily tabernacle in which the Godhead dwelt, his uncircumscribed spirit was in heaven! Light with light, glory with glory, He was in unspeakable communion with the Father! Yet this great and awful One is melted with sorrow, troubled in his mind and soul. The immutable is shaken with human affections, as you see the tree moved by the wind! Tears come from the eyes that watch over things in heaven and things in earth.

Now it is easy and obvious, in comparison, to imagine the infinite and eternal God, dwelling visibly, and, as far as the eye could judge, circumscribed for a while, in a man's

shape, and thus, for some inscrutable purpose, communing face to face with the creatures which his hand had made. Just, as in a lower way, a glorious angel might, for a time, as we sometimes read in the Old Testament, veil himself in a human body; not conjoined or mingled with it, or making it a part of himself, but only robing himself with it, as with a garment, to be put on and off at pleasure. Such thoughts, even out of Scripture, have been found among men. Nay, if God in such a form, for a time moved up and down this world of sin, and manifold miseries, it could not but be that compassion and mercy, and the essential goodness which is inseparable from the Holy One, should burst forth from the disguise of the descended Deity! They would shine like rays all round about! But still, as one should imagine, though God appeared in the flesh, there would be no actual movement of human passion in Him. Rather an unspeakable and awful calm

ness, almost like the stillness of the no disturbance can

great deep which no

reach, in the midst of all his love and compassion for his creatures!

But, secondly, over and above this mystery of the Godhead moved by human feelings at all, there strikes us, if I am not deceived, another, at the first view of the Lord at the grave of Lazarus! Whilst no laughter ever moved the majestic solemnity of the Man of sorrows-whilst we never read that so much as a smile lightened the countenance which the burthen of human sins had marred and furrowed, it is not often that we read of his tears! On one occasion, so far was he from joining in the clamorous sorrow of those about him, that he rebuked it, though it was over the dead body of a dear child, and therefore a fit occasion for lamentation. "Why make ye this ado," he observed, to the friends of Jairus's daughter," and weep?" as though he intended to say, "Such weeping and wail