It is a homely philosophy which common intellects can grasp, which children can understand, and hearts half paralysed by sorrow can take in.  So much the better.  Grief and pain are so common that their cure had need to be easily obtained.  Ignorant and stupid people have to writhe in agony as well as wise and clever ones, and until grief is the portion only of the cultivated classes, its healing must come from something more universal than philosophy; or else the nettle would be more plentiful than the dock; and many a poor heart would be stung to death.  Blessed be God! the Christian view of sorrow, while it leaves much unexplained, focuses a steady light on these two points; its origin and its end.  ’He for our profit, that we may be partakers of His holiness,’ is enough to calm all agitation, and to make the faintest heart take fresh courage.  With that double certitude clear before us, we can face anything.  The slings and arrows which strike are no more flung blindly by an ‘outrageous fortune,’ but each bears an inscription, like the fabled bolts, which tells what hand drew the bow, and they come with His love.

Then, further, the courage thus born of the Scriptures produces another grand thing—­patience, or rather perseverance.  By that word is meant more than simply the passive endurance which is the main element in patience, properly so called.  Such passive endurance is a large part of our duty in regard to difficulties and sorrows, but is never the whole of it.  It is something to endure and even while the heart is breaking, to submit unmurmuring, but, transcendent as that is, it is but half of the lesson which we have to learn and to put in practice.  For if all our sorrows have a disciplinary and educational purpose, we shall not have received them aright, unless we have tried to make that purpose effectual, by appropriating whatsoever moral and spiritual teaching they each have for us.  Nor does our duty stop there.  For while one high purpose of sorrow is to deaden our hearts to earthly objects, and to lift us above earthly affections, no sorrow can ever relax the bonds which oblige us to duty.  The solemn pressure of ‘I ought,’ is as heavy on the sorrowful as on the happy heart.  We have still to toil, to press forward, in the sweat of our brow, to gain our bread, whether it be food for our bodies, or sustenance for our hearts and minds.  Our responsibilities to others do not cease because our lives are darkened.  Therefore, heavy or light of heart, we have still to stick to our work, and though we may never more be able to do it with the old buoyancy, still to do it with our might.