What can it mean? Is it aught to Him That the nights are long and the sun is dim? Can he be touched by the griefs I bear Which sadden the heart and whiten the hair? Around his throne are eternal calms, And glad, strong music of happy psalms, And bliss unruled by any strife! How can he care for my little life? The answer of the Bible is the vision of the pitying God. Our earthly friends have helped us in our sorrows by simply caring. They have come to us in the shadows, and their words and faces have told us that they cared. It is a strange feature of human psychology that just this gives us comfort. Our friends do not solve the problem for us. They do not remove the cause of our pain. But they feel with us, and this is aid. Every sympathizer seems to lift a bit of the weight from our own hearts. When the Bible gives us the revelation of One who pitieth "like as a father pitieth," it brings God into that circle of helpfulness. The lesson goes farther and deeper than this. Though we have not here used the words technically, the soul's dictionary draws a distinction between pity and sympathy. The pitier may never have walked the way that allows him to understand our grief; the sympathizer comes to us from some experience that permits him to remember those that are in bonds as bound with them. We cannot read the Bible long ere we discover that there is in God the capability of joy and sorrow. The passages are abundant that justify this statement. God can be pleased. God can be grieved. If men and women have been made in his image, and if we find in them the capability of pain and sorrow, we are driven to the conclusion that something corresponding thereto must be in the divine nature. The father in the parable of the prodigal son, sitting lonely and mournful in his home, represents God. The father in that same parable meeting his son in the roadway and giving him glad welcome, and calling to his neighbors, "Rejoice with me," likewise represents God. The truth seems to be that the farther up we go in the grade of being, the more capability of pain and of pleasure do we find. The polyp can neither suffer much nor enjoy much. The oyster can enjoy more and suffer more. The bird has its note of joy and its note of pain. Human beings have exquisite powers of enjoyment and equally exquisite powers of suffering. We may well believe that when we reach the perfect being of God both of these capabilities come to their highest. This is the meaning of that verse: Can it be, O Christ Eternal, That the wisest suffer most? That the mark of rank in nature Is capacity for pain? That the anguish of the singer Makes the sweetness of the strain?