itizens of this British empire. So you will show yourselves, as I
believe, worthy Christian men and women. For Christ, the King of kings
and subjects, sends all sorrow, to make us feel acutely. We do not, the
great majority of us, feel enough. Our hearts are dull and hard and
light, God forgive us; and we forget continually what an earnest, awful
world we live in--a whole eternity waiting for us to be born, and a whole
eternity waiting to see what we shall do now we are born. Yes; our
hearts are dull and hard and light; and, therefore, Christ sends
suffering on us to teach us what we always gladly forget in comfort and
prosperity--what an awful capacity of suffering we have; and more, what
an awful capacity of suffering our fellow-creatures have likewise. We
sit at ease too often in a fool's paradise, till God awakens us and
tortures us into pity for the torture of others. And so, if we will not
acknowledge our brotherhood by any other teaching, He knits us together
by the brotherhood of common suffering.

But if God thus sends sorrow to ennoble us, to call out in us pity,
sympathy, unselfishness, most surely does He send for that end such a
sorrow as this, which touches in all alike every source of pity, of
sympathy, of unselfishness at once. Surely He meant to bow our hearts as
the heart of one man; and He has, I trust and hope, done that which He
meant to do. God grant that the effect may be permanent. God grant that
it may call out in us all an abiding loyalty. God grant that it may fill
us with some of that charity which bears all things, hopes all things,
believes all things, which rejoices not in iniquity, but rejoices in the
truth; and make us thrust aside henceforth, in dignified disgust, the
cynic and the slanderer, the ribald and the rebel.

But more. God grant that the very sight of the calamity with which we
have stood face to face, may call out in us some valiant practical
resolve, which may benefit this whole nation, and bow all hearts as the
heart of one man, to do some one right thing. And what right thing?
What but the thing which is pointed to by plain and terrible fact, as the
lesson which God must mean us to learn, if He means us to learn any, from
what has so nearly befallen? Let our hearts be bowed as the heart of one
man, to say--that so far as we have power, so help us God, no man, woman,
or child in Britain, be he prince or be he beggar, shall die h