No sympathy is so genuine and so ready, none so acceptable and helpful as that created by similarity of experience. “What doth he know that hath not been tried?”[131] “Who can rejoice with them that rejoice, and weep with them that weep”[132] like one whose heart has thrilled with the same gladness, and found relief in the same tears? Nothing more endears our Lord to us than the proofs of fellow-feeling that come out in every act of His human life. The Incarnation was the supreme gift of His sympathy. Every weary journey to and fro, every cure of soul or body, every word of warning and of comfort spoke of His sympathy. The Eucharist is His sympathy incarnate to the end of time. No burden of ours is unshared by the Son of man. He has devised expedients that bewilder us by their condescension, in order to bring home to us the truth: “I also have a heart as well as you.”[133] He will weep with his friends beside a grave. He will cower before pain and ignominy. He will be “tempted in all things like as we are”.[134] Nay, He will even clothe Himself with the appearance of sin, be “made sin for us”;[135] feel its burden and its shame; bear the penalty of its guilt, to prove His devotedness to us in His most winning of ways--the sharing of our miseries out of love. All the heavy-laden He invites to Him, but none, perhaps, are more tenderly welcomed than those who come bowed beneath the weight of responsibility. Whether this devolves upon them through their relations with others as superiors, or is the consequence of kinship or friendship, it surely wins for them the sympathy of Him Who knows by His own experience the nature of all such responsibilities and the solicitude they entail. “You call Me Master, and Lord, and you say well, for so I am.”[136] “Is not He thy Father that hath possessed thee, and made thee and created thee?”[137] “As one whom the mother caresseth, so will I comfort you.”[138] He is our Elder Brother, “first-born amongst many brethren;”[139] “the Physician of Whom we all have need;”[140] “the Shepherd and Bishop of our souls”.[141] He knows, therefore, experimentally the peculiar trials of the charge with which we are laden, and we may pour out our hearts to Him with the freedom that comes of perfect trust in One “sorrowful,” “heavy,” “troubled”--“in all things like as we are”.[142]