we would
fain let all dwellers on earth share the blessedness that we have
known. It is not to be; the gospel of pity must needs claim some of
its disciples wholly--and sorrow is their portion. Perhaps under all
their sadness there lurks a joy that passes all known to slighter
souls--I hope so; I hope that they cannot be permitted to endure what
Dante endured. In the purlieus of our cities these resigned, resolute
spirits expend their forces, and their unostentatious figures, passing
from home to home where poor men lie, offer a lesson to the petty
souls of some whose riches and worldly powers are by no means petty.
Ah, it is lovely to see those merciful sisters of the fallen or
falling--good to see the men who help them! Need we pity them? They
would say "No"; but we must, for they live hard. A delicate lady
quietly sets to work in a filthy tenement; her white hands raise up
and cleanse the foulest of the poor little infants who swarm in the
slums; she calmly performs menial offices for the basest and most
ungrateful of the poor--and no one who has not lived among those
degraded folk can tell what ingratitude is really like. Day after day
that lady toils; and the only word of thanks she receives is perhaps a
whine from some woman who wishes to cajole her into bestowing some
gift. These sisters of Sorrow do not need thanks any more than they
need pity; they frankly recognise the baseness of ill-reared human
nature, and they go on trustfully in the hope that maybe things may
grow slowly better. They meet death calmly; they hide their own
sorrow, and even their pity is disciplined into usefulness. The men of
the good company are the same. They have resigned all the lighter joys
of earth, they are calm, and they let the unutterable sadness of the
world spur them on only to quiet efforts after righteousness. Think
what it must be for a man to leave the warm encompassment of the
cheerful day and pass composedly to a gloom which is relieved only by
the inner light that shines from the soul! Were not the hearts of the
heroes pure, they must grow cynical as they looked on the evil mass of
roguery, idleness, foulness, and cunning that seethes around them. But
they have passed the portal beyond which peace is found; and the
sorrow wherewith they gaze on their hapless fellow-men is tinctured
neither by scorn nor weariness. If there is no reward for them, then
we all of us have cause for bitter disappointment. But the forlorn
hope