But of course one does not mean that sympathy is so closely related to what we call charity as what I have just said, if left by itself, would seem to imply.  That is indeed the common form assumed by sympathy which has to be called out.  But the best type of sympathy is the expression of our knowledge of one another; it is based on our knowledge of human nature and our interest in human beings.  Because it is based on knowledge it is not subject to be swept away by the sweet breezes of sentimentalism.  To its perfect exercise it is needful to know individuals not merely to know about them.  The ordinary limitations of sympathy come from this, that we do not want to take time and pains to know one another.  That, for example, is where the Church falls short in its mission to constitute a real brotherhood among its members—­they have no time nor inclination really to know one another, or they find the artificial walls that society has erected impassable.  It is, in fact, not very easy to know one another, and it is impossible to develop the complete type of sympathy with a crowd.  For one must insist that this highest type of sympathy requires, what the word actually does mean, mutual sharing in life, the participation in the lives of our fellows and their partaking in our lives.

So we understand why perfect sympathy is conditioned on spirituality.  Unless we are spiritually developed and spiritually at one we cannot share in one another’s lives fully.  Where there are lives separated by a gulf of spiritual differences the completest sympathy is impossible.  And we understand why Incarnate seems so much nearer to us than God unincarnate.  It is true that “the Father Himself loveth you”; it is true that it is the love of the Blessed Trinity that is expressed in the Incarnation.  The Incarnation did not create God’s love and sympathy, it only reveals it.  Yet it is precisely the Incarnation that enables us to lay hold on God’s sympathy with a certainty and sureness of grasp that we would not otherwise have.  The sight of “God in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself” is more to us in the way of proof than any amount of declaration can be.  To be told of the sympathy of God is one thing, to see how it works is another.

Our personal need in this matter is to find the sympathy that will help us in something outside ourselves, outside the limitations of human nature.  Much as we value human sympathy, precious as we find its expression, yet we do find that it has for the higher purposes of life serious limitations.  It has very little power to execute what it finds needs to be done.  A man may understand another’s weakness and may utterly sympathise with it; he may advise and console, but in the end he finds that he cannot adequately help.  The case is hopeless unless he can point the sufferer to some source outside himself on which he can draw, unless he can lead him to the sympathy of God.  God can offer not only consolation, not only the spectacle of another life which has triumphed under analogous circumstances, but He can give the power to this present weak and discouraged life to triumph in the place where it is.  He can “make a way of escape.”