oquence, music, painting, and sculpture, since the twelfth century,
to wring out of the hearts of women the last drops of pity that could be
excited for this merely physical agony: for the art nearly always dwells
on the physical wounds or exhaustion chiefly, and degrades, far more
than it animates, the conception of pain.

Then try to conceive the quantity of time, and of excited and thrilling
emotion, which have been wasted by the tender and delicate women of
Christendom during these last six hundred years, in thus picturing to
themselves, under the influence of such imagery, the bodily pain, long
since passed, of One Person:--which, so far as they indeed conceived it
to be sustained by a Divine Nature, could not for that reason have been
less endurable than the agonies of any simple human death by torture:
and then try to estimate what might have been the better result, for the
righteousness and felicity of mankind, if these same women had been
taught the deep meaning of the last words that were ever spoken by their
Master to those who had ministered to Him of their substance: "Daughters
of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your
children." If they had but been taught to measure with their pitiful
thoughts the tortures of battle-fields--the slowly consuming plagues of
death in the starving children, and wasted age, of the innumerable
desolate those battles left;--nay, in our own life of peace, the agony
of unnurtured, untaught, unhelped creatures, awaking at the grave's edge
to know how they should have lived; and the worse pain of those whose
existence, not the ceasing of it, is death; those to whom the cradle was
a curse, and for whom the words they cannot hear, "ashes to ashes," are
all that they have ever received of benediction. These,--you who would
fain have wept at His feet, or stood by His cross,--these you have
always with you! Him, you have not always.

58. The wretched in death you have always with you. Yes, and the brave
and good in life you have always;--these also needing help, though you
supposed they had only to help others; these also claiming to be thought
for, and remembered. And you will find, if you look into history with
this clue, that one of quite the chief reasons for the continual misery
of mankind is that they are always divided in their worship between
angels or saints, who are out of their sight, and need no help, and
proud and evil-minded men, who are too def