. . .If she were base and mean, yet our Lord was great, and wise, and good; and that was all the more reason why He should be magnanimous, generous, condescending, like a true King, to the basest and meanest of His subjects.  She asked not for money, or honour, or this world’s fine things: but simply for her child’s health, her child’s deliverance from some mysterious and degrading illness.  Surely there was no harm in asking for that.  It was simply a mother’s prayer, a simply human prayer, which our Lord must grant, if He were indeed a man of woman born, if He had a mother, and could feel for a mother, if He had human tenderness, human pity in Him.  And so, with her quick Syrian wit, she answers our Lord with those wonderful words—perhaps the most pathetic words in the whole Bible—so full of humility, of reverence, and yet with a certain archness, almost playfulness, in them, as it were, turning our Lord’s words a. . . Read More