BOND OF SUFFERING

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 34, 10 February 1931, Page 4

BOND OF SUFFERING

ADDRESS AT ST. ANDREW'S

"Wo meet for worship to-day under the shadow of a great national sorrow," said the Rev. B. J. Howie, in tho course of an address delivered in St. Andrew's Church,;on Sunday evening. Tho hearts of tho ipeople -throughout the wholo ■world, he said, had been stirred to their depths by the calamity that had befallen a section of this country. They ■would indeed be stony hearted if they did not feel keenly the affliction with its attendant sorrow which had been.' experienced during tho last fow days. He -was confident, however, that the spirit of Christ,. which was tho spirit of kindly, sympathetic service, would he abundantly manifested by all who had escaped the tragedy, and that some measure of speedy relief would be granted to those who stood so much in need. They.could not call back to life those .who had porished in the wreckage, but they could condole with those who had been so tragically bereaved, they could do something toward rehabilitating those who^had lost their all, and they could assuredly pray that the God of all comfort would sustain the sufferers in what they would always recall as one of life's most tragic experiences. ' ' There were some things that the grim tragedy made abundantly clear, continued tho speaker. The first was the fact that suffering, wherever it was, to "bo found, brought all members of the liuman raco very'close together. No jnan lived ,to .-himself;'.'.no man siif-. fcrod by hhnsolf; They were'nil memIjors one of aiiother. The terrible misfortune that had befallen others might gust as easily have been their own. In the mercy of Providence they had been spared, and for that reason, if no other, thoy found themselves closo knit with jthosc who had been overwhelmed. Suffering was the longest line of human sympathy—the line' by which the heart could traH'cl farther than by finy other route. Thero were various Knes of sympathy in the present order of the world. Their defect was not that they were inadequate or wanting in in.■tonsity. What they lacked was length. Kinship, for example, was a strong boud of sympathy, but by tho mass of mankind kinship was limited to special streams of heredity. Community of taste was a bond of sympathy, but because tastes were varied, it was for .that reason often a source of division. A ,common, joy wasjto higher natures a bond of sympathy," but only to higher jnatures. None of these bonds encircled humanity. They failed to bind as man and man. There was, however, one thing that did bind—suffering. Sympathy ■with suffering was the widest sympathy jin/tbe world. Truly, suffering had a place somewhere in the providence of .God. They might not be able to penetrate or iathom all its mysteries, but it was »ot without some purpose in the great plan of life. To-day they stood grievously perplexed in the face of one of the profoundest problems that vexed men's minds. There were so many tang-led-threads, but of;this they could rest assured that some*' day the mysteries "would be solved, *nd' all the' tangled threads would then be found woven into a perfect pattern when God's great plan ;£'or;life had been fulfilled.