As we try to think out their relation to each other it presents itself to us as a relation of sympathy.  Sympathy is community of feeling; it is maimed and thwarted when there is feeling only on one side.  We speak of our sympathy in their affliction for others whom we do not know and who do not know us, but that is a very imperfect rendering of the perfect thing.  No more than love does sympathy reach its perfection in solitude.  But here in this village of Judah we know that we have the perfect thing—­sympathy in its most exquisite form.

This capacity for sympathy is one of the greatest of human endowments, and, one is glad to think, not like many human endowments, rare in its manifestation.  In its ordinary manifestation it is instinctive, is roused by the spectacle of need calling us to its aid.  There come to our knowledge from time to time instances of what seem to us very grievous failures in sympathy, but investigation shows that ignorance is very commonly at the bottom of them.  When human beings are convinced of a need they are quite ready to respond.  Indeed this readiness to respond makes them the easy victims of all sorts of impostures, of baseless appeals which play upon sentiment rather than convince the understanding.  And just there lies the weakness of sympathy in that it is so easily turned to sentimentality.  But the sentimentalist who gushes over ills, real or imaginary, can commonly be brought to book easily enough.  For one thing the sentimentalist is devoted to publicity.  He loves to conduct campaigns and drives, to “get up” a demonstration or an entertainment.  I do not mean that he is a hypocrite but only that he loves the lime-light.  When any tragedy befalls man his impulse is to organise a dance in aid of it.  It is extraordinary how many people there are who will aid a charity by dancing to whom one would feel it quite hopeless to appeal for the amount of the dance tickets.  And yet they are not wholly selfish people; there does lie back of the dance a certain sympathetic impulse.  We easily deceive ourselves about ourselves, and it is well to be sure that we have true sympathy and not just sentiment.  It is not so difficult to find out.  We can test ourselves quickly enough by examining our giving.  Do we give only when we are asked?  Do we yield to spectacular appeals or only to those that we have examined and found good?  Do we put the spiritual interests of humanity first?  Is there any appreciable amount of quiet spontaneous giving which is known to no one?  Do we prefer to be anonymous?  Such tests soon reveal what we are like.  One who never gives spontaneously, without being asked, we may be sure is lacking in sympathy.