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."

But there is another form of s