tragedy. In His absolute rectitude, in His confidence in His Father,
in His hours of prayer, in His self-sacrificing regard for His
fellow-sufferers, in His charity, and patience, we see how the
heaviest cross may be borne in the spirit of victory. We learn from
Him how divine grace can mysteriously make the sufferer equal to the
bitterest martyrdom; not putting to our lips some anodyne cup to
paralyze life, but giving us conquest through the strength and
bravery of reason in its noblest mood, through faith in its sublimest
exercise, through a love that many waters cannot quench nor the
floods drown. Poison is said to be extracted from the rattlesnake for
medicinal purposes; but infinitely more wonderful is the fact that the
suffering which comes out of sin counterworks sin, and brings to pass
the transfiguration of the sufferer.

Christ teaches us how, under the redemptive government of God,
suffering has become a subtle and magnificent process for the full
and final perfecting of human character. Science tells us how the
bird-music, which is one of nature's foremost charms, has risen out of
the bird's cry of distress in the morning of time; how originally the
music of field and forest was nothing more than an exclamation caused
by the bird's bodily pain and fear, and how through the ages the
primal note of anguish has been evolved and differentiated until it
has risen into the ecstasy of the lark, melted into the silver note of
the dove, swelled into the rapture of the nightingale, unfolded into
the vast and varied music of the sky and the summer. So Christ shows
us that out of the personal sorrow which now rends the believer's
heart he shall arise in moral and infinite perfection; that out of the
cry of anguish wrung from us by the present distress shall spring the
supreme music of the future.