her heaven-descended Son was the king thereof. A kingdom of exulting
obedience, not of acquiescence, still less of compulsion, lay germed in
his bosom, and he must be laid in the grave ere that germ could send
up its first green lobes into the air of the human world. No throne,
therefore, of earthly grandeur for him! no triumph for his blessed
mother such as she dreamed! There was nothing common in their visioned
ends. Hence came the change of mood to Jesus, and hence the words that
sound at first so strange, seeming to have so little to do with the
words of his mother.

But no change of mood could change a feeling towards mother or friends.
The former, although she could ill understand what he meant, never
fancied in his words any unkindness to her. She, too, had the face of
the speaker to read; and from that face came such answer to her prayer
for her friends, that she awaited no confirming words, but in the
confidence of a mother who knew her child, said at once to the servants,
"Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it."

If any one object that I have here imagined too much, I would remark,
first, that the records in the Gospel are very brief and condensed;
second, that the germs of a true intelligence must lie in this small
seed, and our hearts are the soil in which it must unfold itself; third,
that we are bound to understand the story, and that the foregoing are
the suppositions on which I am able to understand it in a manner worthy
of what I have learned concerning Him. I am bound to refuse every
interpretation that seems to me unworthy of Him, for to accept such
would be to sin against the Holy Ghost. If I am wrong in my idea either
of that which I receive or of that which I reject, as soon as the fact
is revealed to me I must cast the one away and do justice to the other.
Meantime this interpretation seems to me to account for our Lord's words