ligious discourse
when he sat with us at the close of the Lord's day.

How calm and bright and restful the light that falls on the Sabbath evening
tea-table! Blessed be its memories for ever and ever! and Jessie, and De
Witt, and May, and Edith, and Frank, and the baby, and all the visitors,
old and young, thick-haired and bald-headed, say Amen!

CHAPTER LVIII.

THE WARM HEART OF CHRIST.

The first night that old Dominie Scattergood sat at our tea-table, we asked
him whether he could make his religion work in the insignificant affairs of
life, or whether he was accustomed to apply his religion on a larger scale.
The Dominie turned upon us like a day-dawn, and addressed us as follows:

There is no warmer Bible phrase than this: "Touched with the feeling of our
infirmities." The Divine nature is so vast, and the human so small, that we
are apt to think that they do not touch each other at any point. We might
have ever so many mishaps, the government at Washington would not hear of
them, and there are multitudes in Britain whose troubles Victoria never
knows; but there is a throne against which strike our most insignificant
perplexities. What touches us, touches Christ. What annoys us, annoys
Christ. What robs us, robs Christ. He is the great nerve-centre to which
thrill all sensations which touch us who are his members.

He is touched with our physical infirmities. I do not mean that he merely
sympathizes with a patient in collapse of cholera, or in the delirium of a
yellow fever, or in the anguish of a broken back, or in all those
annoyances that come from a disordered nervous condition. In our excited
American life sound nerves are a rarity. Human sympathy in the case I
mention amounts to nothing. Your friends laugh at you and say you have "the
blues," or "the high strikes," or "the dumps," or "the fidgets." But Christ
never laughs at the whims, the notions, the conceits, the weaknesses, of
the nervously disordered. Christ probably suffered in something like this
way, for He had lack of sleep, lack of rest, lack of right food, lack of
shelter, and His temperament was finely strung.

Chronic complaints, the rheumatism, the neuralgia, the dyspepsia, after a
while cease to excite human sympathy, but with Christ they never become an
old story. He is as sympathetic as when you felt the first twinge of
inflamed muscle or the first pang of indigestion. When you cannot sleep,
Christ keeps awake with you. All the p