We have reached our last lesson from the life and character of Queen Victoria. Some will be surprised that this lesson should have been kept for the last one, as the kindness and sympathy of the late Queen was a proverb among her people. But, if we come to think of it, it is far best to have kept it to the last. Mere kindness, apart from sincerity, apart from moral courage, without the rainbow of purity, counts low among the virtues. We have known kind people, have we not, who were weak, who were fickle, who were even treacherous, and there is a sad truth in that half-cynical statement that it is the province of the wise to remedy the mistakes of the good. But what captivated the whole Empire in the sympathy of Queen Victoria was its strength; that one so strong should be so kind; that one so fearless should have so much sympathy; that one whose moral standard was so high should be full of mercy and gentleness. It was that which gave a force to those many stories which came to us about the visits to the little lonely cottages in the Highlands; the telegrams to the women huddled by the pit-mouth in their misery; the letter to the mother of the young officer who had died for his country--what gave force to it all was its strength, the fact that it was no passing impulse, but the deep beating of a true mother's heart, that it was the outcome of character; and that, as is so beautifully said in this description of the virtuous woman in the Book of Proverbs: "In her tongue was the law of kindness." And when we turn from the pattern to the prototype--and never, for a moment, during Lent, can we afford to take our eyes off Jesus Christ Himself--when we turn from the Queen to the Saviour, in Whom she had so simple and so touching a faith, the first thing we find to our comfort is that He, too, felt the need of sympathy. Is there any picture in the whole of the New Testament more touching than that which shows us how He goes just before His greatest trial to seek sympathy from His followers, how He, the Head, the Leader, does not disdain to turn to the very followers who trusted in Him for sympathy? "Couldst thou not watch with Me one hour?" And the picture is so comforting, because it tells us that that craving for sympathy, which all of us feel at times, is a true human instinct, that there is nothing wrong in it, that one of the things that we can do for one another is to be like comrades on a night march, when one or another is stricken down, to stand over him, and be ready, at any moment, with the cup of sympathy to give him. And when Jesus goes to His own disciples to ask them for sympathy, it is a lesson that the need for sympathy is a true need, and the desire for it a true instinct of the human heart.