the pity grows love, for
love is the natural end of pity; and the magnanimity of love,
overleaping moral values, fixes only on the fact of suffering that
appeals for succour, misery that cries for help. This was the vital
fact that Jesus saw when He had compassion on the multitude.

Jesus had compassion on the multitude, and He gives the reason; He saw
them as sheep having no shepherd. It was the element of misdirection
in their lives on which Jesus fixed His glance--it was for lack of
guidance and a shepherd they had gone astray. May not the same be said
of all the lives that fail, whether through ignorance or want, folly or
crime? Rightly guided they might have attained knowledge and esteem,
wisdom and virtue; and if that be so, no man of right spirit can refuse
to feel the pathos of their situation. It is to this point that Jesus
leads us. He makes us conscious of "the still sad music of humanity."
No further incentive is needed to make us love humanity than the pathos
of the human lot. A man may be a knave, a fool, a rogue; yet could we
unravel all the secrecies of his disaster we should find so much to
move our pity, so much in his life which resembles crises in our own,
that in the end the one vision that remains with us is of a wounded
brother man. When once we see that vision all our pride of virtue dies
in us, and quicker yet to die is the temper of contempt which we have
nurtured towards those whose faults offend us. A yet greater offense
is ours if we can behold suffering, however caused, without pity.
Worse than the worst crime which man can commit against society, or the
worst personal wrong he can inflict on us, is the temper in ourselves
which judges him without mercy, and refuses him the one medicine that
may reinvigorate him--the balm of pity and forgiveness. And, after
all, of what wrong is it not true that the bitterest suffering it
creates falls not upon the wronged but the wronger, so that in the end
the sinner is the real victim, and like all victims should be the
object of compassion rather than of vengeance?

THE EMPIRE OF LOVE

_THE WOMAN WHO WAITED_

_She wrought warm garments for the poor,
From morn to eve unwearied she
Went with her gifts from door to door;
And when the night drew silently
Along the streets, and she came home,
She prayed, "O Lord, when wilt Thou come?"_

_She was but loving, she could please
With no rare art of speech or son