Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: friends, who can see nothing in all the universe beyond the grave of Lazarus. Here is surely enough to fill the eye, enough to absorb the sympathy ; but even in this climax of personal emotion the eye of Jesus rests upon something that lies beyond the circumference of personal emotion. He sees not one broken household, but many; not one tortured heart, but the heart of the world itself with all its wounds. He sees the people that stand by. He thinks of them, and so, when Jesus prays for the miraculous power of God to descend upon Him, we are told, " Because of the people that stand by I said it, that they may believe that Thou hast sent Me." Now how are we to interpret this phrase for our edification and instruction? Let me interpret it by one of the plainest facts in human nature, namely, the natural tendency there is in human life toward isolation and selfishness. There are few things in life more selfish than our love and our grief. Even our love is selfish. We bind another to our delight. We elect the object of our love and straightway we seek to surround the object with a jealous and sacred isolation. Let your thoughts range for a single instant over the lyric love-poetry of the world, over the great fictions of the world, and is not the note which is continually struck this note of isolation as the prerogative of love ? There is akind of love which draws its magic circle around its object, builds its guarded paradise, holds it a sacred thing to reserve itself from human contact, and seeks in all things separation from the world's life. Still more selfish is our grief. It is the prescriptive right of grief to seek isolation from the world. The very symbols of mourning are the drawn blind and the closed door and the separate and sad way. Grief projects its own personal emot...