adamant, melting it into contrition and love.

"In every pang that rends the heart,
The Man of sorrows had a part;
He sympathizes in our grief,
And to the sufferer sends relief."

See Him bend over the bed of Jairus's daughter; see Him opening the eyes of
the blind, healing the paralytic, comforting and feeding the poor widow,
and cheering the bereaved and troubled heart. Wherever He went He was "a
brother born for them in adversity." See Him on the cross, when weltering
in blood and struggling with the pangs of a cruel death, He casts His
languid eye upon His aged mother who is there weeping her pungent woes, and
makes provision for her comfort. His sympathy now for all is the same.

"None ever came unblest away;
Then, though all earthly ties be riven,
Smile, for thou hast a Friend in heaven!"

It is this sympathy which makes Him a member of every Christian home. And
when the sympathy of its members is the reproduction of His, they will,
like Mary, sit in loving pupilage at His feet, each becoming the agent of
blessings for all the rest. The wife will seek the salvation of her
husband; the mother will labor with unwearied diligence for the redemption
of her child.

Thus when home-sympathy is purified and developed by Christian faith and
love, it opens up the most elevated of all home-feeling and solicitude, and
becomes the most effectual safeguard against impending ruin. No family can
be true to its privileges and mission without it. It allures to the cross,
leads all the members in the path of the sympathizing one, and prompts them
to say, "Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after
thee; for whither thou goest I will go, and where thou lodgest, I will
lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God; where thou diest
I will die, and there will I be buried; the Lord do so to me, and more
also, if aught but death part thee and me."

What would the Christian home be, therefore, without such sympathy?
Powerless, amoral desolation! We read in God's Word, of men losing natural
affection, and of mothers forgetting their sucking children. But these were
worse than brutes. What shall we then say of Christian parents being devoid
of spiritual sympathy,--shedding no tear of anguish over their moral ruin,
nor showing the least concern about their salvation? Such parents do not
rejoice even over the return of their children to God. They are a disgrace
to the Christian name, and