What he did say was this--"Woman, what is there common to thee and me?
My hour is not yet come." What! was not their humanity common to them?
Had she not been fit, therefore chosen, to bear him? Was she not his
mother? But his words had no reference to the relation between them;
they only referred to the present condition of her mind, or rather the
nature of the thought and expectation which now occupied it. Her hope
and his intent were at variance; there was no harmony between his
thought and hers; and it was to that thought and that hope of hers that
his words were now addressed. To paraphrase the words--and if I do so
with reverence and for the sake of the spirit which is higher than the
word, I think I am allowed to do so--

"Woman, what is there in your thoughts now that is in sympathy with
mine? Also the hour that you are expecting is not come yet."

What, then, was in our Lord's thoughts? and what was in his mother's
thoughts to call forth his words? She was thinking the time had come for
making a show of his power--for revealing what a great man he was--
for beginning to let that glory shine, which was, in her notion, to
culminate in the grandeur of a righteous monarch--a second Solomon,
forsooth, who should set down the mighty in the dust, and exalt them of
low degree. Here was the opportunity for working like a prophet of old,
and revealing of what a mighty son she was the favoured mother.

And of what did the glow of her face, the light in her eyes, and the
tone with which she uttered the words, "They have no wine," make Jesus
think? Perhaps of the decease which he must accomplish at Jerusalem;
perhaps of a throne of glory betwixt the two thieves; certainly of a
kingdom of heaven not such as filled her imagination, even although