One soul was precious to Him. He who alone can estimate alike the worth and the loss of the soul, might have wept, even had there been but one then present found to resist His claims and forfeit His salvation. But these tears extended far beyond that lonely spot in a Jewish village, and the few impenitent hearts that were then flocking around. These obdurate Jews were types of the world's impenitency. There was at that moment summoned before Him a mournful picture of the hardened hearts in every age--those who would read His gospel, and hear of His miracles, and listen to the story of His love all unmoved--who would die as they had lived, uncheered by His grace and unmeet for His presence.
Ah! surely no cause could more tenderly elicit a Redeemer's tears than _this_--the thought of His Redemption scorned, His blood trampled on, His work set at nought.
If we have thought of Him shedding tears over the ruin of the _body_, what must have been the depth and intensity of those tears over the sadder, more fearful ruin of the soul? Immortal powers, that ought to have been ennobled and consecrated to His service, alienated, degraded, destroyed!--immortal beings spurning from them the day of grace and the hopes of heaven! Bitter as may have been the wail of mourning and sorrowing hearts that may then have reached His ear from future ages, more agonising and dismal far must have been the wailing cry which, beyond the limits of time, came floating up from a dark and dreary eternity; those who might have believed and lived, but who blasphemed or trifled, neglected and procrastinated, and finally perished!
If we think of it, it is not the loss of health, or the loss of wealth, or the loss of friends, which forms the heaviest of trials, the deepest ground of soul sadness. _We_ put on the sable attire as emblems of mourning; but if we saw it as a weeping Jesus sees it, there is more real cause for sackcloth and ashes in the heart at enmity with God, and despising His salvation, trampling under foot His Son, and enacting over again the sad tragedy of Calvary.
Reader! are you at this moment guilty of living on in a state of presumptuous impenitence--salvation unsought--Jesus a stranger--His name unhonoured--His Bible unread--His promises unappropriated--His wrath undreaded--defeating all His marvellous appliances of love, and remonstrance, and forbearance--meeting a prodigal expenditure of patience and long-suffering with cold and chilling indifference and neglect--casting away from you the hoarded riches of eternity which He has been holding out for your acceptance? In that sacred Bethany ground, as ye mark these falling tear-drops which dim His eye, there may have been a tear for _you_! Eighteen hundred years have since elapsed, but He to whom "a thousand years are as one day," marked even _then_ your present ungrateful apostacy or guilty alienation--there was a tear then which stole down that cheek on account of unrequited love?