I suppose the greatest influence
a preacher ever exercises, and a chief source of the material and
insight of his preaching, is found in this intimate contact with
living and suffering, divided and distracted men and women. When
strong men blench with pain and exquisite grief stirs within us at
the sight and we can endure naught else but to suffer with them, when
youth is blurred with sin, and gray heads are sick with shame and we,
then, want to die and cry, O God! forgive and save them or else blot
me out of Thy book of life--for who could bear to live in a world
where such things are the end!--then, through the society of sorrow,
and the holy comradeship in shame, we begin to find the Lord and to
understand both the kindness and the justice of His world. In the
moment when sympathy takes the bitterness out of another's sorrow and
my suffering breaks the captivity of my neighbor's sin--then, when
because "together," with sinner and sufferer, we come out into the
quiet land of freedom and of peace, we perceive how the very heart of
God, upon which there we know we rest, may be found in the vicarious
suffering and sacrifice called forth by the sorrow and the evil
of mankind. Then we can preach the Gospel. Because then we dimly
understand why men have hung their God upon the Cross of Christ!
[Footnote 1: _The Divine Comedy: Hell_; canto I.
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