^ Frederick Temple, Archhishoji of Canterbury, i. 238.
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2. The bearing of our own burden in a Christian spirit prepares UB for lifting the load of other people. Every experience carries with it the power of bearing a burden. Have you never passed through times when your own religious faith was at stake ? Then how tenderly you can enter into the mental struggle of others. Have you never known the trouble of making both ends meet ? Then you will sympathize with the burdens of those who dare not be generous, because, by God's grace, they will first be just. Have you known what it is to go to your business, while some dear child was lying, like alabaster, in the sleep of death, and you had to keep down your feelings while you won life's daily bread ? Then how you can feel for others who have left their hearts in the great death-chamber with the closed door.
While it is true that by bearing our own burdens we learn best how to bear other people's, the converse is no less true. There is no help towards bearing our own burdens so effective as the bearing the burdens of others as well. This is the moral paradox of our being. Are we sinking under the weight of our own burden ? Then let us go up to our neighbour, and courage- ously shoulder his also. The two will be lighter, incomparably lighter, than the one was. Is not this demonstrably true ? Is a man's heart wounded and bleeding with some recent sorrow — a cruel bereavement, a disappointed hope, an outraged affection; and he broods over it until the pain becomes too terrible to bear ? The only relief for his agony is found in ministering to the wants or consoling the sorrows of another. His sympathy is thus evoked ; and with sympathy come new interests, new feelings, a new life.
Sad souls, that harbour fears and woes
In many a haunted breast. Turn but to meet your lowly Lord,
And He will give you rest. Into His commonwealth alike
Are ills and blessings thrown; Bear ye your neighbours' burdens ; lo !
Their ease shall be your own. Yield only up His price, your heart,
Into God's loving hold; He turns with heavenly alchemy,
Your lead of life to gold.
426 BURDENS
Some needful pangs endure in peace,
Nor yet for freedom pant; He cuts the bane you cleave to off,
Then gives the boon you want.^
^ Describing David Hill's itinerant tours in China, one of the missionaries, the Eev. T. Protheroe, says, " I venture to add an in- cident which occurred on one of our journeys. He had a servant in training for the work of an evangelist. The servant had given over a bundle of rugs, which served as Mr. Hill's bedding, to an old man who escorted us, and showed evident unwillingness to bear any share even in relieving the old man of his burden. It was a hot day. One word from Mr. Hill would have been enough, but he preferred to teach the much-needed lesson in another way, and said he should carry the bundle himself. Of course, I ob- jected, and there was some dispute as to which of us should bear the burden but he won the day in the end by saying, ' Do let me have it ; I want to teach him humility.' " *
3. The measure of our love to one another must be the love that Christ showed to us. It is an infinite measure. There is no one who can say, " I have done enough for my brother man. I have loved enough." Beyond our most eager efforts stretches the ever-expanding loving-kindness of Jesus. There is no one who can say, " I have forgiven enough ! If my brother sin again, if my enemy do me another wrong, I will forgive no more " ; for beyond our most amazing forgiveness extends the unwearied for- giveness of Christ — the image, the reflexion and the revelation in man of the unconquerable desire to bless and to redeem, which is deepest towards us in the heart of God our Father. Therefore, in this illimitable demand upon us for love, we are greatly blessed. We are placed in the infinite, and kept in the infinite ; we are freed from definitions of love, from maxims of forgiveness, from all the foolish casuistry that limits love. In this, at least, we are not to be content with our limitations. There are no limitations. We are challenged by God Himself to share in His infinity ; never to endure finality in tenderness, never to imagine the end of love. It is a glorious call, and to answer it brings us into the infinite God Himself. So, as the Apostle Paul exhorts the Ephesians, " walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called, with all
1 S, H. Palfrey. ' J. E. Hellier, Life of David Hill, 247.
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lowliness and meekness, with long-suffering, forbearing one another in love."
Thus will you " fulfil the law of Christ " — that law which has its culminating glory in the atoning death of Calvary; its Divinest symbol in the cross. Then only does the higher life begin with us when we bow ourselves before the majesty of this " supreme offering made by supreme love, because the need of man was great, when we feel the glow of a common life with the lost multitude for whom that offering was made, and behold the history of the world as the history of a great redemption in which we ourselves are fellow-workers in our own place and among our own people."