^ My daughter Eppie had an album in which she wrote appropriate mottoes under the various portraits ; under Dr. John Brown's she wrote these lines from one of the elegies on Sir Philip Sidney : —
A sweet attractive kind of grace;
The full assurance given by looks; Perpetual comfort in a face; The lineaments of Gospel books.
What " perpetual comfort " I found in him as the years went on, bringing with them the inevitable cares and troubles, joys and sorrows, is known only to my own heart. Only one dreaded to draw too deeply on his sympathy, so real was the shadow cast on his sensitive spirit by the sorrows of others. Nor was it only his friends' sorrows that he shared ; firmly and tenderly he could face their failures, their defeats, even their sin. To be worthy of Dr. Brown's friendship was an incentive, to more than he knew, to make the best of themselves.^
3. Just as with God, so also with us, comfort is not merely consolation. There are times when we come to God, as a child to its father, to be soothed and quieted, and it is His pleasure to soothe and quiet those who are in any affliction. But there are days when the most comforting thing God can do for us is to nerve us to duty. In both these ways we are to comfort each other. The recognition of the difference will have a very practical effect upon some of our dealings. We have come to believe a little too readily that the supreme way of using Christian sympathy and comfort is always in the attempt to alleviate circumstances. If we do otherwise we are supposed to be hard, inhuman, dictating to others a course which we are not prepared to follow ourselves. The only gospel to the poor and unfortunate, we are told, is the gospel of better wages, better homes, less work, more play. But there is more than that, and we simply rely on the evidence of fact when we say that in the circle of each one of ^ Mrs. E. M. Sellar, Hecollections and Impressions, 93.
22 COMFORT
us some of the noblest and strongest characters we have known have been the product of very hard and, as it seemed, cruel circumstances. Mark, the secret of it was not that there was produced in them a hard, stoical, passive endurance. That was not it at all ; it was that they were strengthened to serve even under such conditions. They were taught by God that no man could sink so low that he could not contribute something to the common life. They have been helped by being taught that even they can help and comfort others.
^ To the Christian soul many a time a personal sorrow, or disappointment, or loss has been a turning-point of life, an occasion for deeper consecration and wider service. In Morley's Life of Cohden there is a quotation from one of John Bright's speeches, which explains how he was led to devote his life first of all to the anti-Corn Law agitation and so to many noble causes. " At that time I was at Leamington, and I was, on the day when Mr. Cobden called on me, in the depths of grief, I might almost say of despair; for the light and sunshine of my house had been extinguished. All that was left on earth of my young wife, except the memory of a sainted life and of a too brief happiness, was lying still and cold in the chamber above us. Mr. Cobden called upon me as his friend, and addressed me, as you might suppose, with words of condolence. After a time he looked up and said, * There are thousands of houses in England at this moment where wives, mothers, and children are dying of hunger. Now,' he said, ' when the first paroxysm of your grief is past, I would advise you to come with me, and we will never rest till the Corn Law is repealed.' " That was chastening yielding its noble fruit, sympathy born of sorrow. John Bright's rich, useful life might have been lost to England, if he had only brooded over his grief and hardened his heart, and refused to listen to the evident call which came to him.^
4. We scarcely need consider how we may comfort others. If we ourselves are comforted of God, the ways in which our comfort will pass to others are endless. Our very troubles have probably more influence than we suspect on the moral condition of those about us who care for us. We may often see this in a home where there is perhaps a sick child, or a sick mother ; there is a tender-heartedness, a kindness, and patience towards the weak in that family, even including the boys, which are the direct result
1 Hugh Black, Comf<yrt, 136.
2 COR. I. 3, 4 n
of the presence of suflfermg. The meaning of that mysterious suffering may be, in part, the development in others of features of character necessary to their well-being, and of maintaining in them that softness of heart so needful to spiritual receptivity. We who are strong little know how much we are indebted for what is best in us to some we love who have gone through suffering, in part, for our sakes. But if that is true of the family, may it not be true of a much wider circle? May not the sufferings of every sufferer under heaven be an instrumentality by which God develops the moral and spiritual character of his fellows? May not our suffering be a means of grace to many whom we do not know we touch ? But it is not so much the suffering, it is the comforted suffering, by which we are made ministers of consolation, even when we say not a word. It is the suffering God has helped us to bear, the suffering He has cheered us in and sanctified to us, that is the highest good, and that in the way of illustrating what God and goodness are.