The kindred word, sympathy, means to have the heart yearning, literally to be suffering the same distress, to be so moved by somebody’s pain or suffering that you are suffering within yourself the same pain too.  Our plain English word, fellow-feeling, is the same in its force.  Seeing the suffering of some one else so moves you that the same suffering is going on inside you as you see in them.  This is the great word used so often of Jesus, and by Him.

There never lived a man who had such a passion for men as Jesus.  He lived to win them out of their distressed, sinful, needy lives up to a new level.  He died to win them.  His last act was dying to win men.  His last word was, “Go ye and win men.”  And His first act when He got back home, all scarred and marred by His contact with earth, was to send down the same Spirit as swayed Him those human years to live in us that we might have the same passion for winning men as He.  Aye, and the same exquisite tact in doing it as He had.

I said the last act was dying to win men.  And you remember that even in the act of dying, He forgot the keen pain of body, and the far keener pain of spirit, to turn His head as far as He could turn it, and speak the word to the fellow by His side that meant the difference of a world to him.  Surely it was the ruling passion with Him to win men, strong in death, aye, strongest in death, and finding its strongest expression in His death.

Counting on Us.

Somebody has supposed the scene that he thinks may have taken place after Jesus went back.  The last the earth sees of Him is the cloud—­not a rain cloud, a glory cloud—­that sweeps down and conceals Him from view.  And the earth has not seen Him since.  Though the old Book does say that some day He’s coming back in just the same way as He went away, and some of us are strongly inclined to think it will be as the Book says in that regard.

But—­have you ever tried to think of what took place on the other side of that cloud?  He has been gone down there on the earth thirty-odd years.  It’s a long time.  And they’re fairly hungry in their eyes for a look again at that blessed old face.  And I have imagined them crowding down to where they may get the first glimpse of His face again.  And, do you know, lately I have been wondering, with the softening of awe creeping into the thought, whether—­the Father—­did not come the very first of them all and—­touch His lips up to where—­the scars were in Jesus’ brow and cheeks—­yes, His hands—­and His feet, too.  Tell me, you fathers here listening, would you not have done something like that with your boy, under such circumstances?

You mothers, wouldn’t you have been doing something like that with your boy?  And all the fatherhood of earth is named after the fatherhood of heaven, we’re told.  And with God fatherhood means motherhood too, you know.  I do not know if it were so.  But I think it’s likely.  It would be just like God.