Nevertheless suffering is a stern fact that will not long permit us to sleep.  Some have taught the unreality of pain, but the logic of life has spoiled their plausible philosophizing.  A man may carry many hallucinations with him to the grave, but a belief in the unreality of pain is hardly likely to be one of them.  The laughing philosopher is quite invincible on his midsummer’s day, but ere long fatality makes him sad.  There is no screen to shut off permanently the spectacle of suffering.  When Marie Antoinette passed to her bridal in Paris, the halt, the lame, and the blind were sedulously kept out of her way, lest their appearance should mar the joyousness of her reception; but, ere long, the poor queen had a very close view of misery’s children, and she drank to the dregs the cup of life’s bitterness.  Reason as we may, suppress the disagreeable truths of life as we may, suffering will find us out, and pierce us to the heart.  Indeed, despite our dissimulations, we know that life is not a matter of lutes, doves, and sunflowers, and at last we have little patience with those who thus seek to represent it.  We will not have the philosophy which ignores suffering; witness the popularity of Schopenhauer.  We resent the art which ignores sorrow.  True art has no pleasure in sin and suffering, in torture, horror, and death; but on its palette must lie the sober colorings of human life, and so to-day the most popular picture of the world is the “Angelus” of Millet.  We will not have the literature that ignores suffering.  “Humanity will look upon nothing else but its old sufferings.  It loves to see and touch its wounds, even at the risk of reopening them.  We are not satisfied with poetry unless we find tears in it.”  We will not have the theology which ignores sin and suffering.  The preacher who confines his discourses to pleasant themes has a meager following; the people swiftly and logically conclude that if life is as flowery as the discourse, the preacher is superfluous.  Foolish we may often be, yet we cannot accept this Gethsemane for a garden of the gods; the most wilful lotus-eater must perforce see the streaming tears, the stain of blood, the shadow of death.  Nature in the full swing of her pageantry soon forgets the wild shriek of the bird in the red talons of the hawk, and all other sad and tragic things, but humanity is compelled to note the blood and tears which flow everywhere, and to lay these things to heart.

Christ giveth us the noblest example of suffering.  So far from shutting His gate on the sackcloth, once more He adopted it, and showed how it might become a robe of glory.  He Himself was preeminently a Man of sorrows; He exhausted all forms of suffering; touching life at every point, at every point He bled; and in Him we learn how to sustain our burden and to triumph throughout all the tragedy.  In His absolute rectitude, in His confidence in His Father, in His hours of prayer, in His self-sacrificing regard