2. Sorrow becomes our guest in the night of broken health. The powers once were vigorous. We ran to our tasR. Caution was scorned. Life seemed made to combat. We had the strength of Hercules. But something broke. We came against a stone wall. We reached a limit. Our wings were clii)ped. Suddenly we discovered that tlie race must be won by swifter feet than ours. Possibly we complain as a recent prisoner of pain who
' Archbishop Davidson, in Francis Paget, Bishop of Oxford, xviii.
PSALM XXX. 5 41
said, " I cannot see why people should be born into a world like this to suffer. Could I have seen my life from the beginning, and had I been consulted as to whether I should live to suffer, I certainly would have chosen never to have been." Possibly we have money ; but pain hurts the rich and poor alike. Possibly we are religious ; but pain hurts both the infidel and the Christian. Possibly we deny pain or endure it as heroically as Epictetus, the Phrygian philosopher-slave, in the Eoman court, who said, when his master with some instrument of torture cruelly twisted his servant's leg, " If you go on you will break it " ; and who also said calmly, without expressing any of the anguish he felt when his brutal master did go on, " I told you that you would break it." Possibly you despise the old suffering house in which you live as did this same ancient thinker, and define yourself as " an ethereal existence staggering under the burden of a corpse." But what- ever attitude we sustain towards pain, it wrings the stifled cry from our heart, and our face often feels the burning touch of a tear.
^ Heine, suffering great physical agony, living in his mattress grave, has given us verse upon verse of sweet sadness — sometimes bitter in harsh complaining against God and man ; while James Thomson, in his great poem on London, " The City of Dreadful Night," even says that, could he not have made a less miserable world, he would not be God for all His glory — a horrible utterance, but yet the answer of a man who has been made heartsick by the poverty and misery of East London, the sight of innumerable children who never know childhood, so soon does life curse them.^
3. Sorrow comes to tarry with us in the night of hereavement. It may be only for an infant whose beauty was never caught by a camera, and whose innocent feet were too fair to walk other than streets of the city of God. It may be for a friend or a lover who, in the sweet old days, went out of our life and left us for an imperishable treasure only the sacred memories of hours that can never return. After these many years, were a cross-section made of our soul, we feel that the image of that blessed being would be found mirrored thereon. It may be for a mother, whose voice will never again this side the stars call her child ; or for a father, whose big, brave life will no more bid us follow the path of virtue.
* F. Lynch.
42 THE TRANSIENCE OF SORROW
We know that to-day in the little city of the dead, hard by the city of the living, sleeps the dust of our sacred dead, or under other skies they who are dead to us walk forgetful of old ties and obligations. So onward we all go, each bearing his burden of sorrow.
^ In some instances the Indian mothers literally cry their eyes out ; and if you ask a blind woman how she lost her vision, she may answer that it was by weeping too hard for her lost relatives, and dimness of sight is attributed to the same cause. The wailings of an Indian over his lost relative, and especially of a mother over her lost children, are piercing and heart-rending ; but it is pleasant to see the contrast in this respect between those who are still ignorant of the Gospel and such as have received it. The Christian converts have now learned to accept their bereave- ments as from God's hand in silence and submission, and their mute grief is more impressive than the loud lamentation of the heathen.^
^ Scarlet fever in its most virulent form appeared in Carlisle (where Dr. Tait was then Dean), and, of the six little daughters whose presence had brought radiance to the Deanery, the heart- broken parents were called, within the space of a few weeks, to part with all except the infant who had just been born. One by one, between the 10th of March and the 10th of April, they were laid in the single grave in Stanwix Churchyard. The last entry which has been quoted from the diary was dated March 2. The entry which immediately succeeds it is as follows : —
" Thursday, 8th May 1856. — I have not had the heart to make any entry in my journal now for above nine weeks. When last I wrote I had six daughters on earth ; now I have one, an infant. 0 God, Thou hast dealt very mysteriously with us. We have been passing through deep waters : our feet are well-nigh gone. But though Thou slay us, yet will we trust in Thee. . . . They are gone from us, all but my beloved Craufurd and the babe. Thou hast re-claimed the lent jewels. Yet, 0 Lord, shall I not thank Thee now ? I will thank Thee not only for the children Thou hast left to us, but for those Thou hast re-claimed. I thank Thee for the blessing of the last ten years, and for all the sweet memories of their little lives — memories how fragrant with every blissful, happy thought. I thank Thee for the full assurance that each has gone to the arms of the Good Shepherd, whom each loved according to the capacity of her years. I thank Thee for the bright hopes of a happy re-union, when we shall meet to part