The Pulpit Commentary — Revelation — Section 470

· Ver. 4.-" Neither ihall there be any more pa,m:., a Hoapita~ Swn.4,Jy lll!'l'mOn. If the wards of our hospitals could declare what words of Holy Scripture, what gracioua promises out of God's book, are, more often than almost any other, spoken, read, or thought of, and most beloved, by the suffering inmates of those wards, it would be found that they are such as our text. For pain is indeed a terrible thing. No language can adequately describe what it is when, in its intenser form&, it fastens upon us. Even from great saints of God it has wrung words which have shown that the burden -of it was almost greater than they could bear. The holy Job, under the stress of it, eould scarce resist the temptation to •• curse the day wherein he was born," and in his an!!:uish he declared, "My soul chooseth strangling and death rather than life." " Why am I thus afflicted more than others?" he paFsionately asks. "Why bast thou set me as a mark for thI, arrows? why dost thou not let loose thy band and cut me off from the earth?" Ana not such utterances as these onl.v attest the severity and strain which pain puts upon the soul, but, also, the glad thanksgivings which rise up to God when deliverance from ~uch pain has been given. Take Ps. cxvi., for e:itample. And though many of you may scarce know what real pain is, never having experienced it or anything like it, yet you are able, we trust, both to feel very grateful for your happy exemption hitherto, and also to sympathize, deeply and tenderly, with those to whom a harder lot is assi~ned. You have. had some vision of the anguished face, and of the deadly chill and fai.nt, that are ·associated with extreme pain ; and your heart has been touched, as ii well may, with compassion. Therefore, though you know not pain by experience yet, along with those who do; you also can rejoice in this promise, as to an eternal home, that there" there shall be no more pain." And mean- while let us gratefully remember how much our Lord Jesus CJh'l'id has done to turn thia ctirse of pain i11to a blessiflg. It will not make us less ready to sympathize with or sueoour those who now are suffering, but will qualify us to do both better than before. For- · L Cimt8T BAS DONE TlIIB. First of all: 1. By taking it upon himw/. "He himself pare our infirmities, and carried our diseases." So was it predicted concerning .him; And when he came here he fulfilled Isaiah'll word by the intensity of his holy sympathy, whereby the 11orrows, pains, and distresses of those whom he healed· were felt by him as if they were his own. And yet more, by himself -submitting to pain so terrible that he could say to all suffering ones in all ages, "Come, see if there ever wa.s sorrow like onto my sorrow." Then he took the lot ef pain upon himself. He hat1 entered into it not only by Divinest sympathy but by actual experience, So that now the sufforerti tread no solitary path; One is with tl1em in the roughest, sternest of its ways, and that One is "like nnto the Son of man." 'l'hey may have the fellowship of his sufferings, because he certainly has the fellowship of theirs. Have we not see11 or heard often- Simes how, in the paroxysms of a~ony with which poor pain-stricken ones are now and aoain seized, they 1ove, when the drend dark hour comes upon them, to have by them t~me one dear to them, the dearest they possess, and to clasp his or her hand a11d to feel the clasp of theirs; to pour out to them their cries and tefll'S, and to be soothed t\nd llrengthened by the loving sympMhy on which thtly lean Y Maybe aome uf us lmve taken part in scenes like thflt. But such blessed aid,-and more tban tha:t, our Lorn wills that every su:lferer should have by reason of his sympathy, his presimce,and his d#n dear love. The present writer well remembers how a poor young girl, :ciying tn mttcn pain, told him that she loved to look at a picture, which hung by h11r- bed.itch\ Qi the_ !:laviour bearing his cross_; for, she said, "it ~elps me to bear my pain bettel'." tea, every Bllfferer may grasp hJS hand, and be assured that, though uosren and unfelt cir m. 1-2'7.] TBE REVELATION' OF. ST. JOHN THE· DIVINE. 521