so; and those of us who have caught a vision of the better times coming through reason, through knowledge, through manly and womanly endeavor, have caught a sight of a Christendom passing away, of a religion of sorrow declining, of a gospel preached for the poor no longer useful to a world that is mastering its own problems of poverty and lifting itself out of disabling misery into wealth without angelic assistance.  This is our consolation; and while we admit, clearly and frankly, the real power of the popular faith, we also see the pillars on which a new faith rests, which shall be a faith, not of sorrow, but of joy.”  Now, the deepest sorrow of the race is not physical, neither is it bound up with material and social conditions.  As the Scotch say, “The king sighs as often as the peasant”; and this proverb anticipates the fact that those who participate in the richest civilization that will ever flower will sigh as men sigh now.  When the problem of poverty is mastered, when disease is extirpated, when a period is put to all disorganization of industry and misgovernment, social and political, it will be found by the emancipated and enriched community what is now found by opulent individuals and privileged classes, that the secret of our discontent is internal and mysterious, that it springs from the ungodliness, the egotism, the sensuality, which theology calls sin.  But whatever the future may reveal, all the sorrows of life are upon us here and now; we cannot deny them, we have constantly to struggle with them, we are often overwhelmed by irreparable misfortune.  Esther “sent raiment to clothe Mordecai, and to take his sackcloth from him; but he received it not.”  In vain do men offer us robes of beauty, chiding us for wearing the color of the night; we cannot be deceived by flattering words; we must give place to all the sad thoughts of our mortality until haply we find a salvation that goes to the root of our suffering, that dries up the fount of our tears.

In a very different spirit and for very different ends do men contemplate the dark side of human life.  The cynic expatiates on painful things—­the blot on life’s beauty, the shadow on its glory, the pitiful ending of its brave shows—­only to gibe and mock.  The realist lingers in the dissecting chamber for very delight in revolting themes.  The pessimist enlarges on the power of melancholy that lie may justify despair.  The poet touches the pathetic string that he may flutter the heart.  Fiction dramatizes the tragic sentiment for the sake of literary effect.  Cultured wickedness drinks wine out of a skull, that by sharp contrast it may heighten its sensuous delight; whilst estheticism dallies with the sad experiences of life to the end of intellectual pleasure, as in ornamental gardening, dead leaves are left on ferns and palms in the service of the picturesque.  But Christianity gives such large recognition to the pathetic element of life, not that it may mock with the cynic, or trifle with