It was for woman to make beautiful her mission by her implicit faith; it was for woman to minister to his physical wants; her humility would find a delightful office when she bathed his feet with her tears, and her faith had comforting expression when she wiped them with the hairs of her head. Woman’s care provided the household comforts which humanity needed, and woman’s piety sat self-abased, yet gathered strength at the Master’s feet as he opened the oracles of truth. Woman wept for him as he bore his cross upward to Calvary; and woman lingered at the foot of that cross when others had fled; and it was woman that came earliest to kneel at the sepulchre. Where service was to be performed, where faith was to be tried, where physical wants were to be supplied, and physical suffering assuaged, there woman was to be found. But where the agony of mental passion was to be endured; where the unspeakable and the incomprehensible were to be exhibited, woman was not. Her mission of faith and love required no such exercise, her feelings demanded no such purification.
We have done. The picture which we give is suggestive, and we hope that it will suggest more to others than we have been able to express; because to such a scene as the artist represents, when the heart or fancy enters it is lost in amazement. A thousand thoughts crowd, less for utterance than for existence, and we feel that when there is more than earthly love, more than earthly interest, the idea must be more than human, and expression will be infinitely short of the conception.
HUMAN INFLUENCE.
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BY MARIE ROSEAU.
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Oh! deem not thou canst lightly err,
And none may bear its weight but thee:
There’s none on earth who stands alone,