ell ask
why life is the sphere of duty and the nursery of virtues! For if all
men were equal, if there were no suffering and no ease, no poverty and
no wealth, would you not sweep with one blow the half, at least, of
human virtues from the world? If there were no penury and no pain, what
would become of fortitude; what of patience; what of resignation? If
there were no greatness and no wealth, what would become of benevolence,
of charity, of the blessed human pity, of temperance in the midst of
luxury, of justice in the exercise of power? Carry the question further;
grant all conditions the same,--no reverse, no rise, and no fall,
nothing to hope for, nothing to fear,--what a moral death you would at
once inflict upon all the energies of the soul, and what a link between
the Heart of Man and the Providence of God would be snapped asunder!
If we could annihilate evil, we should annihilate hope; and hope, my
brethren, is the avenue to faith. If there be 'a time to weep and a time
to laugh,' it is that he who mourns may turn to eternity for comfort,
and he who rejoices may bless God for the happy hour. Ah, my brethren,
were it possible to annihilate the inequalities of human life, it would
be the banishment of our worthiest virtues, the torpor of our spiritual
nature, the palsy of our mental faculties. The moral world, like the
world without us, derives its health and its beauty from diversity and
contrast.

"'Every man shall bear his own burden.' True; but now turn to an earlier
verse in the same chapter,--'Bear ye one another's burdens, and so
fulfil the law of Christ.' Yes, while Heaven ordains to each his
peculiar suffering, it connects the family of man into one household, by
that feeling which, more perhaps than any other, distinguishes us from
the brute creation,--I mean the feeling to which we give the name of
sympathy,--the feeling for each other! The herd of deer shun the stag
that is marked by the gunner; the flock heedeth not the sheep that
creeps into the shade to die; but man has sorrow and joy not in himself
alone, but in the joy and sorrow of those around him. He who feels only
for himself abjures his very nature as man; for do we not say of one who
has no tenderness for mankind that he is inhuman; and do we not call him
who sorrows with the sorrowful humane?

"Now, brethren, that which especially marked the divine mission of our
Lord is the direct appeal to this sympathy which distinguishes us from
the b