^ If any one still insist that it seems irreverence, if not blasphemy, to speak of a suffering God, or to ascribe in any way pain or unhappiness to the Ever-Blessed, then, let me add, it may in some measure meet his difficulty to reflect that all moral suffering contains or carries with it what may be called an element of compensation, in virtue of which it is transmuted into a deeper joy. . . . And if this be so, then surely what we must find in Christ as the God-man is, not a being who stript or emptied Himself of His essential divinity in order to share in the weakness and suffering of humanity, but a manifestation of God in all the plenitude of the Divine Nature ; and the whole life of the Man of Sorrows — His earthly lowliness. His mortal weakness, grief, and sorrow, His loneliness and forsakenness, His drinking of the cup of suffering to the very dregs, yea, in His very crucifixion and 1 P. 0. Ainsworth, A Thornless World, 159.
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death — must be to us the disclosure of an ineffable joy triumphing over sorrow, of a Divine bliss in sacrifice which is the last, highest revelation of the nature of God.^
4. It is not the hurden, hut the hurden-hearer, that God sustains. — It is not the heavy sorrow, but the bleeding heart that He takes into His strong keeping. And here we may notice the significant rendering of this text found in some of the most ancient versions : " Blessed be the Lord, who daily beareth us." So we can give God our burden only by giving Him our life. At this point the figure of a burden fails to represent accurately the toil and trouble of life, unless we remember it is a burden that cannot be laid down. It is bound to our shoulders by the cords of many necessities. Divine and human, and the answer to our prayer for help does not come in a loosening of these cords, but in inward refreshment of spirit. So the exhortation to us to cast our burden on the Lord and this promise of His sustaining grace do not speak to us of an occasional expedient to which the more trying experiences of life may drive us, but of the true relation of our life to God day by day.
^ A father sitting in his study, sent his little boy upstairs to fetch a book that had been forgotten. The boy was long gone, and after a time the father thought he heard the sound of sobbing on the stairs. He went out, and at the top of the staircase he saw his son crying bitterly, with the great book he had tried to lift and carried so far, lying at his feet. " Oh, father ! " the lad cried, " I cannot carry it, it is too heavy for me ! " In a moment the father ran up the stairs, and stooping down, took up both the little lad and the book in his strong arms, and carried them down to the room below. Before he reached it, the child's tears were all dried up, and he was leaning on his father's arm, the burden and the trouble gone.^
5. When God thus bears our hurden the burden itself becomes a blessing. — It carries him that carries it. It is like the wings of a bird; it is like the sails of a ship. In many lands the habit prevails, especially amongst the women, of carrying heavy loads on their heads ; and all travellers tell us that the practice gives a dignity and a grace to the carriage, and a freedom and a swing to the gait, which nothing else will do. Depend upon it, that so
^ John Caird. * G. S. Barrett, Mxmngsfor Quiet Hours, 29.
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much of our burdens of work and weariness as is left to us, after we have cast them upon Him, is intended to strengthen and ennoble us.
^ The bearing of God has been likened to a father carrying his child, to an eagle taking her young upon her wings, to the shepherd with the lamb in his bosom. But no shepherd, nor mother-bird, nor human father ever bore as the Lord bears. For He bears from within, as the soul lifts and bears the body. The Lord and His own are one. " To me," says he who knew it best, " to me to live is Christ." ... It is not the sight of a visible leader, though the Gospels have made the sight imperishable, it is not the sound of Another's Voice, though that Voice shall peal to the end of time, that Christians only feel. It is something within themselves; another self — purer, happier, victorious. Not as a voice or example, futile enough to the dying, but as a new soul, is Christ in men.^
^ The hindrances that baffle or overwhelm us, the small annoyances that rob our days of zest and sweetness, the body's perpetual chafing tyranny, in all these we are facing universal conditions, and bidden to realize a universal being: An infinit- esimal fraction of the burden that God bears is on our shoulders — but we are not bearing it alone. This spiritual toil is no degrading punishment laid on us merely for our sins, but the measure of our sonship. Infinite patience seems often to be all that is asked of us. But patience is Godlike — patience is love submitting, and enduring, transmuting poison to sweetness in the life, as surely as enthusiasm is love conquering and striving, and flowing out towards God and man. Nor can we draw distinctions concerning their relative value to God.*