superiority to his pupils.

To all this must be added the constant sufferings from sympathy with
human misery as it met him in ten thousand forms at every step. What a
trial for him, the purest, gentlest, most tender hearted, to breath more
than thirty years the foul atmosphere of this fallen world, to see the
constant outbursts of sinful passions, to hear the great wail of
humanity borne to his ear upon the four winds of heaven, to be brought
into personal contact with the blind, the lame, the deaf, the paralytic,
the lunatic, the possessed, the dead, and to be assaulted, as it were,
by the concentrated force of sickness, sorrow, grief, and agony!

But how shall we describe his passion, more properly so called, with
which no other suffering can be compared for a moment! There is a lonely
grandeur in it, foreshadowed in the word of the prophet; 'I have trodden
the winepress alone, and of the people there was none with me.' If great
men occupy a solitary position, far above the ordinary level, on the
sublime heights of thought or action, how much more then Jesus in his
sufferings; he, the purest and holiest of beings! The nearer a man
approaches to moral perfection, the deeper are his sensibilities, the
keener his sense of sin and evil and sorrow in this wicked world. Never
did any man suffer more innocently, more unjustly, more intensely, than
Jesus of Nazareth. Within the narrow limits of a few hours we have here
a tragedy of universal significance, exhibiting every form of human
weakness and infernal wickedness, of ingratitude, desertion, injury, and
insult, of bodily and mental pain and anguish, culminating in the most
ignominious death then known among the Jews and Gentiles, the death of a
malefactor and a slave. The government and the people combined against
him who came to save them. His own disciples forsook him; Peter denied
him; Judas, under the inspiration of the devil, betrayed him. The rulers
of the nation condemned him, rude soldiers mocked him, the furious mob
cried: 'Crucify him!' He was seized in the night, hurried from tribunal
to tribunal, arrayed in a crown of thorns, insulted, smitten, scourged,
spit upon, and hung like a criminal and a slave between two robbers and
murderers!

How did Christ bear all these little and great trials of life, and the
death on the cross?

Let us remember first, that, unlike the icy stoics in their unnatural
and repulsive pseudo-virtue, he had the keenest sensibilitie