We feel, when we look at the joy that is in the world, that we cannot read it as we should, we cannot enter into it as we ought, we cannot feel ourselves bound to it with ties that nothing can sunder, except we have first had our acquaintance with pain. Even lovewhich spells sacrifice-love presumes pain. Is there any man, be he Christian, Jew, or Atheist, who would be without the love that lightens his life? To be without the pain he must be without the love; neither can exist-nor does exist-in this world without the other; and in the next, I take it that the highest joy, the bliss unspeakable, without which we are never to be, will be that in which the experience of pain is latent, but not perceived; experienced, but not remembered. Our sorrow shall be turned into joy.

Here I come to the second part of the value of which I have spoken. Let me state the points without attempting to illustrate. Humanity is one; we take the problem in its wholeness. If any man can affirm that in general, whatever he may say of particulars, pain has proved to be a good for him-or, rather, to be careful of language, a means to a good-I ask that man where the good is going to stop. Can you be perfectly content if you realise that your brethren, the rest of humanity, are excluded from the good that you have earned? Assuredly not. Personality comes to its own only in relations. The highest joy which mankind has shown itself capable of knowing is that of vicarious suffering. Sometimes we shrink from that highest, but for those who have shown themselves capable of it there has come a great discovery, the discovery that that joy which calmly seeks that blessed

ness is his who gives himself that others may live. Now, when I say your life has a value to humanity, it may be that God is carrying out that principle in you without consulting you. There is such a thing as vicarious experience. Who knows but that the poor man outside this church this morning, who, of another's fault and not of his own, has been moved to a suffering which you shall never share, is doing something for you? If I am unduly mystical, let me say this in support, if not in proof, of my proposition: What you are living to-day you are living for me as well as for yourself. No one like you will ever live again, and no one will live precisely your life. What you are doing, what you are suffering, is for humanity as well as for yourself. You are an end in yourself. God thinks of you as though none other had ever lived, but He thinks of you in relation to the rest, and when the great story comes to be told you will find that suffering has been giving, and that men have been giving in their pain who never knew it at all.

That brings me to the last point-that suffering is giving. That is the way in which I should like to read of God. If you could have God come again, or supposing you had never heard of Him on the plane of human history at all, and knew nothing about God except what preachers say and you yourself have thought, how would you have Him to come? If God came on the clouds of heaven, declaring Himself with great pomp and glory, I think I should shrink from the great psalm of majesty; there would be a note wanting that I should long to hear. But if God came as a fellow and as a leader, and laid Himself alongside my every experience; if God showed Himself capable of

suffering, I should feel that God had reached to the ultimate in His nature, and bound me to Him there. And so it has been. Jesus Christ has come. Jesus Christ has come to bring us to the Father; He came bearing His Cross. He leads humanity through the Via Dolorosa; when He takes us through the waters He is at our side, and it is from His lips in the hour of Gethsemane that I hear the promise, "Your sorrow shall be turned into joy." Let me read to you the words of a Roman Catholic theologian, which strike me as being so beautifully true that they may fitly be quoted here: "Our Lord left a special blessing for those children of the first resurrection, who, being perfected in a short time, have fulfilled many times, and are taken in the unsullied freshness of their early bloom, by the wasting sickness or the baptism of blood, to behold the King in His beauty and the land that is far away. But sooner or later a crisis comes in the lives of the rest of us who linger here, when we are constrained to walk-it may be with backward step and averted eye-up the road that leads to Calvary, and the sun goes down at noon, and the stars withdraw their shining, and the Cross stands bare and cold under the darkened heavens, and we must be stretched thereon, whether we will or no. It is well for all in that hour of solitary trial who can patiently, nay, thankfully, embrace their cross as knowing that, indeed, they are not alone, but are crucified with Jesus."

Here is the secret of all highest joy, the greatest paradox in human experience-the Cross is the secret of the Crown. Without it you do not know life; without it you do not know God. Life is not all darkness, and whatever darkness there is we can defy, for even

here and now the secret of the Lord is with them that stand under the shadow of Calvary. You have nothing to fear, for it is a pierced hand that holds the sceptre of the world. In the suffering Christ is my hope of glory and of the bliss that fadeth not away. We listen with thankfulness and with confidence to His promise, given as He went forward to His own Cross," Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid."

VIII

CHRISTIANITY AND THE SOCIAL

ORDER

Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven so in earth. Give us, day by day, our daily bread.—Luke xi. 2-3.

If ye fulfil the royal law according to the Scripture, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself, ye do well; but if ye have respect to persons, ye commit sın.-James ii. 8-9.

M

ANY of you must have been privileged to see some time ago the Tissot gallery of paintings, illustrative of our Lord's life and ministry. It was an interesting collection of paintings from this circumstance, if for nothing more, that the great painter who gave them to the world spent ten years after his conversion in studying on the spot in the Holy Land the conditions under which our Lord must have lived and wrought and taught. It seems to me that God must have taught the painter Himself. One of the pictures which most commanded my attention was that entitled "The Lord's Prayer." Here Tissot portrays the Master standing in the midst of His disciples, who are seated in a semicircle around Him, like a class waiting at the knees of a teacher. The Master's hand is raised in hortatory fashion, and the disciples are evidently repeating after Him the words of the Lord's Prayer. It struck me that there, by a flash of intuition, the painter was per