all dread of shame or loss, even loss of love itself, that yoke will set
us free.

These words of the Lord--so many as are reported in common by St Matthew
and St Luke, namely his thanksgiving, and his statement concerning the
mutual knowledge of his father and himself, meet me like a well known
face unexpectedly encountered: they come to me like a piece of heavenly
bread cut from the gospel of St John. The words are not in that gospel,
and in St Matthew's and St Luke's there is nothing more of the kind--in
St Mark's nothing like them. The passage seems to me just one solitary
flower testifying to the presence in the gospels of Matthew and Luke of
the same root of thought and feeling which everywhere blossoms in that
of John. It looks as if it had crept out of the fourth gospel into the
first and third, and seems a true sign, though no proof, that, however
much the fourth be unlike the other gospels, they have all the same
origin. Some disciple was able to remember one such word of which the
promised comforter brought many to the remembrance of John. I do not see
how the more phenomenal gospels are ever to be understood, save through
a right perception of the relation in which the Lord stands to his
father, which relation is the main subject of the gospel according to St
John.

As to the loving cry of the great brother to the whole weary world
which Matthew alone has set down, I seem aware of a certain
indescribable individuality in its tone, distinguishing it from all his
other sayings on record.

Those who come at the call of the Lord, and take the rest he offers
them, learning of him, and bearing the yoke of the Father, are the salt
of the earth, the light of the world.