n of the soul.

In the next place, another practical lesson which I would draw from this
is, as to the sole conditions upon which any form of Christian help can
be rendered. The condition for the elevation of men is that the lever
which lifts them must have its point below them. That is to say, you
have to go down if you would heave up. You have to go amongst if you
would deliver; you have to make your own, by a sympathy which you have
learned of your Master, the sorrows and the sins of humanity, if you
would effectually remedy them. A guinea to an hospital is not your
contribution to the Christ-like relief of human suffering. It wants, and
He wants, your heart, your sympathy. Think for a moment of the universe
of anguish that may lie within the narrow limits of one human body--that
awful mystery of pain which holds in its red-hot pincers hundreds and
thousands of men and women in this city at this moment. Try to imagine
the mass of bodily agony, an enormous percentage of which is utterly
innocent, and a still larger percentage of it perfectly remediable,
which at this hour, whilst we sit here, is torturing mankind. And oh!
brethren, do not let any thought of the transcendent importance of
Christ's gospel, and what it does to men's hearts, make us careless
about these real, though lesser, evils which lie beside us, and which we
can remedy and help.

Only, remember the condition of help for them all. The newspapers went
into raptures some years since, and wisely, over a Roman Catholic priest
who shut himself up in a little island with a colony of lepers. Some
Protestant martyrs have done the same before him, without any chorus of
newspaper praise. Whoever did it had penetrated to the secret of
Christian help--identification with the evil. If we would take away any
misery or sin, we must act like that doctor who shut himself up in the
wards of an hospital, and kept a diary of the symptoms of his disease,
till the pen dropped from his fingers and the film came over his eyes.
Are we ready to do anything like that for our brethren? Until we are, we
have yet to learn and to practise the pattern which He has set, 'Who,
though He was rich, for our sins became poor': and who, 'forasmuch as
the children were partakers of flesh and blood, Himself likewise'--in
their own fashion of weakness, and weariness, and sorrow, and pain, and
ultimately death--'took part of the same.' 'He bore our sicknesses,'
therefore He bore them away, an