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for mankind, His heart was thrilled with the agonized entreaty of one thief. For one coin the woman swept the house ; for one sheep the shepherd faced the midnight ; for one son, and him a sorry prodigal, the father in the home was broken-hearted. That is complete assurance that our God is the God of individuals. "Thou art as much His care, as if beside, nor man nor angel moved in heaven or earth." He is Almighty, and takes the whole wide universe into the covering hollow of His hand, yet He is the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob.
3. The God who counts the stars is the only sufficient healer of broken hearts. Only He, in virtue of His Deity, can read the secret sorrows of the heart, to whom " all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid." This is the prerogative of God, and of God alone. And none but He, in virtue of His Humanity, can lay His hand upon the broken heart to mollify and heal its wounds. How often there are deep down in the heart feelings too sad and too sacred for utterance to mortal ears, when we crave for a higher sympathy than that which man can give, and the soul finds relief only in reaching out in prayer to God. And there is no limit to God's sympathy. It is bound only by the horizon of human need and human suffering. The heart broken with contrition for sin, the heart bruised with the sorrows of life, the heart bleeding with the anguish of bereave- ment— these all find a response in the heart of God, for this is the sphere of His pity, of His compassion, and of His love. There is no human sorrow but appeals to Him.
^ Think you He cannot sympathize with our worst sorrows, who shielded from scorn the broken-hearted who could only smite upon his breast; who stood like a God between their victim and the hell-hounds who were baying for their prey, till they cowered at His feet and slunk away ; who could forgive a coward, and select the alien and heretic as a type of the neighbour who is to be loved; who was peculiarly sensitive to the charm of woman's society and its soothing gentleness; who wept for temporary grief ; who was considerate for the tired disciples and the hungry multitude ; whose chosen home was the house of the publican and sinner ; who bore contempt with majestic dignity — is that a trifle ? — who felt keenly, as His own touching words witness, the pain of homelessnese ? Oh, can you say that He
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could not enter into our worst sorrows, or that His trials were in " show " ? Comprehend that heart, containing all that was manliest and all that was most womanly. Think what you will, but do not mistake Hira, or else you will lose the one great certainty to which, in the midst of the darkest doubt, I never ceased to cling — the entire symmetry and loveliness, and the unequalled nobleness of the humanity of the Son of Man.^
4. What is this wonderful ligament with which Christ binds the wounds of the once broken heart ? It is the sympathy with another's pain; it is the remembrance that I suffer not alone. The sympathy with my brother restrains my personal outflow. It takes away the egotism of my grief. I no longer feel that a strange thing has befallen me. I no longer resent the raincloud as a special wrong. I feel that it is not special — that it is universal It is the thought of this that stops the outward bleeding of my heart. It makes me refuse to show my wound. It forbids me to cry out in the streets as if I were a solitary sufferer. It says, " Think what your brother must feel ; he has the same pains as you ! " It bids me count the burdens of the passers-by ; and, as I count, I forget to remember my own.
^ The actual conditions of our life being as they are, and the capacity for suffering so large a principle in things, and the only principle always safe, a sympathy with the pain one actually sees, it follows that the constituent practical difference between men will be their capacity for a trained insight into those conditions, their capacity for sympathy; and the future with those who have most of it. And for the present, those who have much of it have (I tell myself) something to hold by, even in the dissolution of a world, or in that dissolution of self, which is for everyone no less than the dissolution of the world it represents for him. Nearly all of us, I suppose, have had our moments in which any effective sympathy for us has seemed impossible, and our pain in life a mere stupid outrage upon us, like some over- whelming physical violence; and we could seek refuge from it at best, only in a mere general sense of goodwill, somewhere perhaps. And then, to one's surprise, the discovery of that goodwill, if it were only in a not unfriendly animal, may seem to have explained, and actually justified, the existence of our pain at all.