Christ’s Sympathy with Man

Mark xiv. 28 v. “I will go before thee into Galilee,”

Jesus, Thou art always on before me; nowhere so far in advance as in Galilee. I have never come near to Thee in Galilee — the land of human sorrows, the region of the shadow of death. I am only learning in the latest times the imitation of Thy work for man. Thou hast seen further than I into the cause and into the cure. I had thought that religion wanted only a soul; Thou hast claimed for God the redemption of the hody. I had thought that the life of faith demanded the surrender of earthly comforts; Thou hast required for that life the restoration of these comforts. I had thought that the hospital was lor this world, and the Church for the world to come; Thou hast made the hospital a temple to the Father’s praise. In the culture of the past Thou art the only modern. None stood beside Thee in Galilee; Thou troddest alone the winepress of human pain. None felt with Thee the sympathy for man as man. They felt for man as Greek, as Jew, as Roman; but not as man — not as hopeless, friendless, landless. It was reserved for Thee to lead the way to Galilee — to the men without a country and without a home. Thou hast burst all boundaries but those of sorrow. Thou hast descended below all accidents — below race, and clime, and kindred. Thou hast gone down beneath all qualities — beneath beauty, and virtue, and fame. Thou hast broken the f 2 barriers of caste; Thou hast passed the fences of respectability; Thou hast travelled beyond the confines of extenuating circumstance. Thou hast reached the last motive for charity — the right of hunger to bread. Thou hast invited man to come to Thee without a nay, with the very plea of destitution. Thou hast summoned him in his rags, in his tatters, in his nothingness: Thou hast accepted him without merit and without excuse; Thou hast asked him for no vindication but a cry. We, of latter days, have claimed the gospel of charity as our own. We have written an inscription in golden letters, inviting to our feast the labouring and heavy-laden. We have brought it to Galilee with shouts of exultation; we have called it the symbol of our modern advancement. But lo! as we have gone to hang it up on the wall, the wall is already occupied with another placard, and it is in words identical with ours. Oh, Son of Man, Thou hast been before us. Thou hast outrun our philanthropy; Thou hast anticipated our benevolence; Thou hast forestalled our charity. Thou hast modelled our infirmaries; Thou hast planned our orphanages; Thou hast sketched

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our asylums; Thou hast devised our houses of refuge; Thou hast projected our homes of reform. Thou hast vindicated the claims of the returned convict; Thou hast asserted the sacredness of infant life; Thou hast given a hand to the climbing steps of woman. Thou hast outstripped both Peter and John in the race to the ancient sepulchres of humanity; at the end of all our progress we have met Thee in Galilee.