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GOD AND YOUR GOD. What more could she want? Think: the Father of
Jesus, with whom, in all his knowledge and all his suffering, the
grand heart was perfectly, exultingly satisfied,--that Father he
calls our Father too. He shares with his brethren--of his best, his
deepest, his heartiest, most secret delight, and makes it their and
his most open joy: he shares his eternal Father with us, his perfect
God with his brethren. And whatever his not having yet ascended to
him may mean, we see, with marvel and joy, that what delayed
him--even though, for some reason perfect in tenderness as in truth,
he would not be touched--was love to Mary Magdalene and his mother
and his brethren. He could not go to the Father without comforting
them first. And certainly whatever she took the TOUCH ME NOT to mean
or point at, it was nothing that hurt her.--It just strikes me--is
it possible he said it in order to turn the overwhelming passion of
her joy, which after such a restoration would have clung more than
ever to the visible presence, and would be ready to suffer the pains
of death yet again when he parted from her--might it be to turn that
torrent into the wider and ever widening channel of joy in his
everlasting presence to the innermost being, his communion, heart to
heart, with every child of his Father? In our poor weakness and
narrowness and self-love, even of Jesus the bodily may block out the
spiritual nearness, which, however in most moods we may be unable to
realise the fact, is and remains a thing unutterably lovelier and
better and dearer--enhancing tenfold what vision of a bodily
presence may at some time be granted us. But how any woman can help
casting herself heart and soul at the feet of such a lowly grandeur,
such a tender majesty, such a self-dissolving perfection--I cannot
imagine. The truth must be that those who kneel not have not seen.
You do not once read of a woman being against him--except indeed it
was his own mother, when she thought he was going all astray and
forgetting his high mission. The divine love in him towards his
Father in heaven and his brethren of men, was ever melting down his
conscious individuality in sweetest showers upon individual hearts;
he came down like rain upon the mown grass, like showers that water
the earth. No woman, no man surely ever saw him as he was and did
not worship!"
Helen turned and glided back into the house, and neither knew she
had been there.
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