The Bible does not make light of sorrows. Its heroes have their troubles. Call the roll of its sons and daughters and you will find that at some time each one of them was a child of grief. The Book does not assign burden and pain and sorrow to the class of unrealities. Neither does it assign them to the class of negations. In the Bible sorrow is real and sorrow is positive. When Rachel weeps for her children, the scene is real. When David goes into the room in the tower over the gate and utters his pitiful lament over Absalom, the Book does not describe his anguish as an illusion. Paul's hunger and thirst, and stripes and shipwrecks, and perils and imprisonments were not the vain froth of a mortal mind. Jesus's cross, and the thorns and the nails and the spear, and the tauntings of the passers-by, and the thirst, and the darkened face of the Father were not swept into the void by reciting a formula about the All. Jesus gave a promise to his disciples, "In the world ye shall have tribulation." He kept that promise. They walked the ways of martyrdom. Their spirits won victories over their flesh. Yet there is no hint that their persecutions and deaths were the fictions of error or the dreams of a night that did not exist. The Bible, being real, ministers to sorrow that is real. The Book, too, touches on all the phases of comfort that we may gather from the surface of life, only it does not make them either a full gospel of consolation or a large part of that gospel. Sometimes a word of Scripture will suggest the method of comparison implied in the statement, "It might be worse." Paul does this with one quick word. "Our _light_ affliction," he puts it. We have lost one hand; we might have lost two! We have lost one eye; we might have lost both! We have been sick one week; it might have been a year! Sometimes this method carries us off into rather graceless comparisons of ourselves with other people as if, indeed, we were divine favorites. Can a man prove more divine providence for himself by assuming that there is less for another person? This road of comparison leads to phariseeism unless we watch carefully against a despicable by-path. Tennyson in his "In Memoriam," which is a poem of comfort, shows much impatience with this false form of consolation: One writes, "that other friends remain," That loss is common to the race; And common is the commonplace, And vacant chaff well meant for grain. That loss is common would not make My own less bitter, rather more; Too common! Never morning wore To evening but some heart did break. This method of comparison is inadequate. Whether the word "light" makes our imagination furnish the details of the worse affliction, or whether it contrasts our sorrows with the greater sorrows of others, it does not do enough for our smitten hearts.