C.

"Being in Bethany, in the house of Simon the leper, as He sat at meat, there came a woman having an alabaster box of ointment of spikenard very precious; and she brake the box, and poured it on His head. And there were some that had indignation within themselves, and said, Why was this waste of the ointment made? For it might have been sold for more than three hundred pence, and have been given to the poor. And they murmured against her. And Jesus said, Let her alone; why trouble ye her? she hath wrought a good work on me. For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good: but me ye have not always. She hath done what she could: she is come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying. Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this Gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world, this also that she hath done shall be spoken of for a memorial of her."-St. Mark xiv. 3-10.

Exposition. Isaac Williams says: "It seems in this its exceeding preciousness and its exquisite fragrancy, to have differed from that similar offering of the sinner, in St. Luke vii, of

which nothing of this kind is mentioned. Our Lord in providing that this good deed should be published to all the world, has also given us to know who the woman was; it was Mary who had chosen the good part, who long before this time had sat at His feet, while her sister Martha was serving. Now also again Martha is serving, but not reproving her sister. That part has now fallen to another, and if this Mary should, as St. Augustine and some others suppose, be the same person as the sinner recorded as anointing our Lord in St. Luke, during the earlier part of His ministry in Galilee, then this would be the third time our Lord defended her against reproof... It may be that she first of all anointed His feet, as St. Augustine suggests, and then proceeded to arise in humble confidence with her good deed, and ventured to anoint His head also. She was not attending on all the guests generally, observes St. Chrysostom, but on our Lord alone she bestows this honour, and approaches Him not as man, but as One greater than man, which is shown by the very lowly action of wiping His feet with her hair. . . . She felt doubtless that what she was now doing was but little indeed, in return for the inestimable riches that she had received, but it was the free will of a grateful mind, which deeply felt that it was nothing for Him to receive or for her to

give; and in that largeness of heart which ariseth from overflowing love, she might have thought, what are the poor when compared with the Lord of the poor Himself, Who was there in poverty? Her brother had been lately restored to them by Him from the very corruption, the coldness, the darkness, of the grave, and she herself felt assured within her of a miracle far greater and more wonderful even than that. His powerful voice had called her own soul from the corruption, the darkness and cold desolation of a worse grave; had loosed the grave-cloths, the death-bands of sin, which had bound her, and had bid her go free in the light of a better day; and had received her to sit with Himself at heavenly tables and to listen to His word."

And Swete: "The goodness of the act lay in the grateful love which it displayed: no sacrifice was too costly to offer to One Who had restored her brother to life. The Lord's tacit acceptance of supreme devotion as His due is not less remarkable than Mary's readiness to render it. The beauty of a good act varies according to the relation in which it stands to Christ. . There was no intention on the Lord's part to contrast services rendered to Himself in person with services rendered to the poor for His sake the two are in His sight equivalents. His purpose is to point out that

the former would very soon be impossible, whilst opportunities for the latter would abound till the end of time. Whensoever ye will ye may do them good: the will was not wanting to the Apostolic Church; the faith of Christ yielded a new ground of sympathy with the needy which in all ages has made the Church a refuge of the destitute. . . . Mary could not prevent the Lord's death; what she did He accounts as a supreme effort to do honour to His dead body. Fragrant unguents were used for anointing the dead body-a process to be distinguished from embalming, which, as we see in St. John xix, 39, consisted of laying myrrh and aloes in the folds of the grave-clothes. And St. Mark relates how on Saturday night the women had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint Him. But the resurrection prevented the fulfilment of their design, and thus, as it seems, the only anointing which the Lord received was this anticipatory one at Bethany a week before He lay in the tomb."

Westcott says: "The act of anointing was symbolic of consecration to a divine work. This Mary felt to be imminent. The anointing to the sacred office was an anointing for the tomb. No one grudges the gifts of affection to the dead; and this natural sacrifice of love, acknowl

edged by all, Mary had made, though she knew not the full import of the act."

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First Thought.-It is well for us to give heed to our Lord's word, "The poor ye have with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good but me ye have not always". No one could insist more strongly than He upon the duty of works of mercy. Yet that is a side of the Gospel which always appeals to the better sort of men, and which is made much of in these days especially. There is never any lack of opportunity for blessing and helping our needy fellows-the poor we have with. us always. But it is also characteristic of our day that men make little of the duty of honouring and praising almighty God, and of devoutly worshipping Him. The holy sacrifice of the altar is our Lord's peculiar memorial, of which He said, "Do this in remembrance of me." Nevertheless very large numbers of Christians make nothing of the duty of hearing Mass on the Lord's day. The second commandment, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" is glorified as if it were the whole of Christ's religion; while the first commandment, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and mind and soul and strength", is very largely ignored. There are not many found who are