The woman departs in peace; Simon is satisfied; Jesus triumphs; we
almost hear the applauses with which the ages and generations of earth
greet the closing scene. From the serene celestial immensity that opens
above the spot we can distinguish a voice, saying, "This is my beloved
Son; hear ye him!"

We speak of these things dramatically, but, after all, they are the only
great realities. Everything else is mimetic, phantasmal, tinkling.
Deeply do the masters of the drama move us; but the Gospel cleaves,
inworks, regenerates. In the theatre, the leading characters go off in
death and despair, or with empty conceits and a forced frivolity; in the
Gospel, tranquilly, grandly, they are dismissed to a serener life and a
nobler probation. Who has not pitied the ravings of Lear and the agonies
of Othello? The Gospel pities, but, by a magnificence of plot altogether
its own, by preserving, if we may so say, the unities of heaven and
earth, it also saves.

Of all common tragedy, we may exclaim, in the words of the old play,--

"How like a silent stream shaded with night,
And gliding softly, with our windy sighs,
Moves the whole frame of this solemnity!"

The Gospel moves by, as a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal,
from the throne of God and the Lamb; on its surface play the sunbeams of
hope; in its valleys rise the trees of life, beneath the shadows of
which the weary years of human passion repose, and from the leaves of
the branches of which is exhaled to the passing breeze healing for the
nations.