(2) God is also " the Father of mercies," He is the Father of pity, of compassion, the Father of that gracious spirit to which we have given the name " Samaritanism," That is the kind of mercy which streams from the hills. Mercy is the very spirit of Samaritanism. It stops by the wounded wayfarer, it dismounts without condescension, it is not moved by the imperative of duty, but constrained by the tender yearnings of humanity and love. It is not the mercy of a stern and awful judge, but the compassion of a tenderly-disposed and wistful friend. Our God is the Father of such mercies. Wherever the spirit of a true Samaritanism is to be found, our God is the Father of it. It was born of Him. It was born on the hills.
It streams from the hills, It descends to the plain.
1 Hugh Black, Comfort, 10.
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Wherever we discover a bit of real Samaritanism we may claim it as one of the tender offspring of the Spirit of God. With what boldness the Apostle plants his Lord's flag on territory that has been unjustly alienated from its owner, and claims it for its rightful King ! " The Father of mercies."
(3) And he is the " God of all comfort." What music there is about the word ! It means more than tenderness : it is strength in tenderness, and it is tenderness in strength. It is not a mere palUative but a curative. It not merely soothes, but heals. Its ministry is not only consolation but restoration. " Comfort " is " mercy " at work, it is Samaritanism busy with its oil and wine. And again let us mark that whenever we find this busy goodness among the children of men, exercising itself among the broken limbs and broken hearts of the race, the Lord is the fountain of it. He is the " God of all comfort," of every form and kind and aspect.
^ I have always found, in talking to my people in private, that all second-hand talk out of books about the benefits of affliction was rain against a window-pane, bhnding the view but never entering. But if I can make a poor wretch believe that God is the foe of all misery and affliction, that He yearns to raise us out of it, and to show us that in His presence is the fulness of all life and joy, and nothing but our own wilfulness and imperfection keeps us in it for an instant, that the moment he will allow God to remove those sorrows, the Lord will rejoice in doing so, — it is enough.^
Let me count my treasures,
All my soul holds dear. Given me by dark spirits
Whom I used to fear.
Through long days of anguish,
And sad nights, did Pain Forge my shield, Endurance,
Bright and free from stain!
Doubt, in misty caverns,
'Mid dark horrors sought, Till my peerless jewel.
Faith to me she brought. ^ Charles Kingsley.
2 COR. I. 3, 4 17
Sorrow, that I wearied
Should remain so long, Wreathed my starry glory,
The bright Crown of Song.
Strife, that racked my spirit
Without hope or rest, Left the blooming flower.
Patience, on my breast.
Suffering, that I dreaded.
Ignorant of her charms, Laid the fair child, Pity,
Smiling, in my arms.
So I count my treasures.
Stored in days long past — And I thank the givers,
Whom I know at last ! ^
IIL
Why Comfort Comes.
"That we may be able to comfort them that are in any affliction."
1. God's dealing with a particular man is not an end in itself but is designed for a larger end for which the particular man is used. St. Paul saw this fully, and therefore his life has been the wonder of Christian history. The moral and spiritual ends involved in salvation can be secured only by the working of God's love through loving men. St. Paul blessed God for the personal comfort he had received in his affliction, but he saw beyond that to the great wide purpose in the heart of God. He saw himself to be not an end but an instrument. He blessed God not so much for the personal comfort as because through the personal comfort he was enabled to continue the work to which he had given his life. Most of us never see much beyond ourselves. We hedge ourselves in within our own borders. We desire the sunshine for ourselves and, it may be, bless God for every ray of it. But we do not always understand the object of God's love ^ Adelaide Procter, Legends and Lyrics, i. 60. 2 COR. & GAL. — 2
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and comfort, that for which He gives us it. We do not always see that we are blessed in order that we may bless, comforted that we may comfort, and get that we may give.
^ No man has come to true greatness who has not felt in some degree that his life belongs to his race, and that what God gives him He gives him for mankind. It is the different degrees of this consciousness that make the different degrees of greatness in men. If you take your man full of acuteness, at the top of his speciality, of vast knowledge, of exhaustless skill, and ask your- selves where the mysterious lack is which keeps you from thinking that man great — why it is that, although he may be a great naturalist, or a great merchant, or a great inventor, he is not a great man — the answer will be here, that he is selfish ; that what God gives him stops in himself ; that he has no such essential humanity as to make his life a reservoir from which refreshment is distributed, or a point of radiation for God's light. And then if you take another man, rude, simple, untaught, in whom it is hard to find special attainments or striking points of character, but whom you instinctively call great, and ask yourself the reason of that instinct, I think you find it in the fact that that man has this quality : that his Ufe does take all which it receives, not for its own use but in trust ; that in the highest sense it is unselfish, so that by it God reaches man, and it is His greatness that you feel in it. For greatness after all, in spite of its name, appears to be not so much a certain size as a certain quality in human lives. It may be present in lives whose range is very small. There is greatness in a mother's life whose utter unselfishness fills her household with the life and love of God, transmitted through her consecration. There is greatness in a child's life who is patient under a wrong and shows the world at some new point the dignity of self-restraint and the beauty of conquered passions. And thence we rise until we come to Christ, and find the perfection of His human greatness in His transmissiveness ; in the fact that what He was as man. He was not for Himself alone but for all men, for mankind. All through the range of human life, from lowest up to highest, any religious conception of human greatness must be ultimately reducible to this : a quality in any man by which he is capable first of taking into himself, and then of distributing through himself to others, some part of the life of God.i