The thought of it ought to make our lives better, not at some future time, but today, now. Our Judge is One who has passed through our experience, and knows our temptations, but He suffered and died, and bestows upon us sacramental grace, that we may conquer temptation.

In our Lord's picture of the final judgment, we cannot fail to be struck by the contrast between the magnificence of the spectacle and the almost informal nature of the basis of judgment. It is such as to create surprise both in those who are praised and in those who are condemned. "Lord, when saw we Thee ahungered, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not. minister unto Thee?" It is the kind of test which flings the whole great question of judgment back from the future into the daily life of the present. It is the kind of judgment to which we are being subjected every day, by opportunities that lie all about us, and constitute, as it were, our very atmosphere. By these we are being tested, at every moment, and judged.

XII.

THE MYSTERY OF PAIN AND SORROW.

The God of all grace, who hath called us unto his eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after that ye have suffered a while, make you perfect.-I S. PETER V, 10.

A LARGE part of the narrative in all the four Gospels is taken up with a description of the suffering and death of Christ. But to the idea of physical suffering no prominence is given. That the Crucifixion offers rare opportunity for vivid and horrible word-pictures of pain most of us are well aware. How marvelous is the reverent selfrestraint of the evangelists! In all the narrative there is no word, with one possible exception, that brings to the surface any expression of physical pain.

What light does the Cross throw upon the mysterious problem of human pain and sorrow?

The problem of suffering has always been a baffling one, but it is more especially a practical difficulty of faith in the present age. Where it once was debated by philoso

phers as an academic question, it is now an every-day puzzle both to the wise and ig norant. Why does God permit so much suffering? Or, Why does He permit such suffering in this individual case?

The first reason for the silence of the evangelists concerning the physical sufferings of altogether subservient to the great sacrifice of will, and the physical pain was nothing compared with the mental and moral pain endured by the Redeemer.

But another fact must also be recognized. In the age in which Christianity began, the sight of physical pain did not stir such deep emotion, or arouse any such compassion, as in modern times. It would be difficult to say whether men were any less sensitive to physical pain inflicted upon themselves. Perhaps they suffered then just as they suffer now. But it did not hurt them, as it hurts today, to see other men enduring torture. If the man himself did not suffer, he looked upon the sufferings of others with somewhat stolid indifference.

Pity and compassion are largely the creations and developments of Christian civiliza

tion. It is only little by little, in the course of history, that the world is touched with the divine quality of mercy. But slowly it brings about a great reform. Everywhere it establishes hospitals for the relief of pain. It enters foul prisons, and demands that even the enemies of society shall be maintained in decency, and protected from unnecessary persecution. It frees the slave on land. It abolishes flogging aboard ships upon the high seas. It improves tenements in cities. It establishes charities. The whole world of today shudders at the cruelty and miseries of war, which was once regarded as the normal and honorable game of all rightminded men.

Within our own memory compassion has taken to its heart not merely the sufferings of men, but also the sorrows of the brute creation. The huntsman of the forest must now apologize for himself. The birds of the air are now protected by public sentiment in their right to life and joy. Physical pain today hurts the beholder. It causes sympathetic pain to see any man's suffering, or to witness the beating of a cart-horse.

These facts belong to one of the noblest aspects of modern civilization. It is that

little by little the compassionate Man of Nazareth has touched with His divine pity the life of the world.

We have come into this inheritance which the Christian ages have produced, and with it comes the great danger that this splendid and exalted virtue of compassion may be allowed to degenerate into a flabby sentiment, a fastidious hyper-sensitiveness, and a contemptible self-pity. There are maudlin, ineffective tears over the wrongs of man and beast that are more detestable than the most stolid stoicism. There is a self-pity for one's own wrongs, and sufferings, and ailments, that degrades human nature to a plane beneath contempt.

Strangest of all, the development of that divine compassion which God set growing in the hearts of men has, in this age of its fruition, led men to think themselves more compassionate than God. They dare to lead Almighty God before the bar of human justice, and to say that He is cruel, on the ground that they cannot otherwise explain the cause of human pain and bereavement. Thus the over refinement of compassion has produced a new occasion of religious indif