for His fellow-sufferers, in His charity, and patience, we see how the heaviest cross may be borne in the spirit of victory.  We learn from Him how divine grace can mysteriously make the sufferer equal to the bitterest martyrdom; not putting to our lips some anodyne cup to paralyze life, but giving us conquest through the strength and bravery of reason in its noblest mood, through faith in its sublimest exercise, through a love that many waters cannot quench nor the floods drown.  Poison is said to be extracted from the rattlesnake for medicinal purposes; but infinitely more wonderful is the fact that the suffering which comes out of sin counterworks sin, and brings to pass the transfiguration of the sufferer.

Christ teaches us how, under the redemptive government of God, suffering has become a subtle and magnificent process for the full and final perfecting of human character.  Science tells us how the bird-music, which is one of nature’s foremost charms, has risen out of the bird’s cry of distress in the morning of time; how originally the music of field and forest was nothing more than an exclamation caused by the bird’s bodily pain and fear, and how through the ages the primal note of anguish has been evolved and differentiated until it has risen into the ecstasy of the lark, melted into the silver note of the dove, swelled into the rapture of the nightingale, unfolded into the vast and varied music of the sky and the summer.  So Christ shows us that out of the personal sorrow which now rends the believer’s heart he shall arise in moral and infinite perfection; that out of the cry of anguish wrung from us by the present distress shall spring the supreme music of the future.

The Persian monarch forbidding sackcloth had forgotten that consolation is a royal prerogative; but the King of kings has not forgotten this, and very sweet and availing is His sovereign sympathy.  Scherer recommends “amusement as a comfortable deceit by which we avoid a permanent tete-a-tete with realities that are too heavy for us.”  Is there not a more excellent way than this?  Let us carry our sorrows to Christ, and we shall find that in Him they have lost their sting.  It is a clumsy mistake to call Christianity a religion of sorrow—­it is a religion for sorrow.  Christ finds us stricken and afflicted, and His words go down to the depths of our sorrowful heart, healing, strengthening, rejoicing with joy unspeakable.  He finds us in sackcloth; He clothes us with singing-robes, and crowns us with everlasting joy.

III.  We consider the recognition by revelation of death.  We have, again, adroit ways of shutting the gate upon that sackcloth which is the sign of death.  A recent writer allows that Shakespeare, Raleigh, Bacon, and all the Elizabethans shuddered at the horror and mystery of death; the sunniest spirits of the English Renaissance quailed to think of it.  He then goes on to observe that there was something in this fear of the child’s vast and unreasoned