^ Golden Thoughts of Carmen Sylva, 35.
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95
tragedy at Whitehall, the most tragic, perhaps, all things con- sidered, in the history of our country, when, as the old poet Marvell says,—
He nothing common did or mean
Upon that memorable scene ;
But with his keener eye
The axe's edge did try,
Nor Heaven invoked, with vulgar spite,
To vindicate his helpless right,
But bowed his comely head
Down, as upon a bed, - While his last thoughts were, as we know,
Turned to the cross, and his last words, " I go
From a corruptible crown to
An incorruptible," —
here was the real secret of the Eestoration which followed — here the moral force which, in the end, saved by ennobling the English monarchy.^
*[| It is a tremendous moment when first one is called upon to join the great army of those who suffer. That vast world of love and pain opens suddenly to admit us one by one within its fortress. We are afraid to enter into the land, yet you will, I know, feel how high is the call. It is as a trumpet speaking to us, that cries aloud — " It is your turn — endure." Play your part. As they endured before you, so now, close up the ranks — be patient and strong as they were. Since Christ, this world of pain is no accident untoward or sinister, but a lawful department of life, with experiences, interests, adventures, hopes, delights, secrets of its own. These are all thrown open to us as we pass within the gates — things that we could never learn or know or see, so long as we were well.
God help you to walk through this world now opened to you as through a kingdom, regal, royal, and wide and glorious.^
3. We suffer in mind, we suffer in body, we suffer in soul.
(1) We suffer in mind. — Prom the point of view of religion there is the suffering of doubt, which comes at times like a cloud between almost every Christian and God. But we suffer not only from doubt, but from fears — fears whether we shall persevere, fears whether we can stand against the storm of trial and tempta-
' Canon H. P. Liddon.
* Canon Scott Holland, in a letter to Romanes, in Life and Letters of George John Homaries, 284.
96 A PROPITIATION AND A PATTERN
tion, fears, perhaps, whether we are even now in the narrow way. We suffer from perplexity, from the difficulty of deciding our duty in the many questions which come before us. And we suffer in mind lastly, and perhaps most often, in what may be called the " worries " of life ; the irritations, the trifling troubles of every day — trifles in themselves, and each one easy to be borne if it stood alone; but coming so continually, coming so thickly, the worries of life often seem to overwhelm us.
We turn to our Lord and we follow Him through His whole life of sorrow and suffering, but we find that He seems to be always so calm — with Him there is no doubt, no perplexity, no fear, no worry. There is one scene in our Lord's life which seems to be the climax of the concentrated suflering of His mind — that time, between twelve and three upon Good Friday, when He hung upon the Cross, doing penance for the sin of the world, and darkness rolled, not only around His Cross, hiding from sight the light of day, but into His very soul, and extorted from Him that one cry of complaint, the only one in His whole life, " My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me ? " Once only in His life does our Lord reveal to us the sufferings of His mind.
^ On reading his correspondence, some may accuse him of indicating too strongly his loneliness and passionate desire of sympathy ; they may call his fancies diseased, his complaints im- manly, and his transient doubts unchristian. But his faithless- ness was but momentary : only the man who can become at one with Frederick Eobertson's strange and manifold character, and can realize as he did the agony and sin of the world, — only the man who can feel the deepest pain, and the highest joy, as Eobertson could have felt them — has either the right or the capability of judging him. Doubts did cross his mind, but they passed over it as clouds across the sun. The glowing heart which lay behind soon dissipated them by its warmth.
With regard to his passionate desires and his complaint, they were human, and would have been humanly wrong in him only if he had allowed them to gain predominance over his will, righteously bent all through his life, not on their extinction, but on their subjugation. The untroubled heart is not the deepest, the stern heart not the noblest, the heart which crushes all expression of its pain not that which can produce the most delicate sympathy, the most manifold teaching, or speak so as to give the greatest consolation. Had not Eobertson often suffered, and suffered so much as to be unable sometimes to suppress a cry, his sermons
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