Pain, the constant problem of man, and perhaps more, of woman--of unmarried woman more especially--he never discussed as modern people discuss it. He never made light of pain any more than of poverty; he understood physical as well as moral distress. Nor did he, like some of his contemporaries and some modern people, exaggerate the place of pain in human experience. He shared pain, he sympathized with suffering; and his understanding of pain, and, above all, his choice of pain, taught men to reconsider it and to understand it, and altered the attitude of the world toward it. His tenderness for the suffering of others taught mankind a new sympathy, and the "nosokomeion", the hospital for the sick, was one of the first of Christian institutions to rise, when persecution stopped and Christians could build. "And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he healed them," says Matthew (21:14) in a memorable phrase. I have heard it suggested that it was irregular for them to come into the temple courts; but they gravitated naturally to Jesus. The mystic is never quite at leisure for other people's feelings and sufferings; he is essentially an individualist; he must have his own intercourse with God, and other people's affairs are apt to be an interruption, an impertinence. "I have not been thinking of the community; I have been thinking of Christ," said a Bengali to me, who was wavering between the Brahmo Samaj and Christianity. The blessed Angela of Foligno was rather glad to be relieved of her husband and children, who died and left her leisure to enjoy the love of God. All this is quite unlike the real spirit of the historical Jesus. "Himself took our infirmities and bare our sicknesses," was a phrase of Isaiah that came instinctively to the minds of his followers (Matt. 8:17, roughly after Isaiah 53:4). Perhaps when we begin to understand what is meant by the Incarnation, we may find that omnipotence has a great deal more to do than we have supposed with natural sympathy and the genius for entering into the sorrows and sufferings of other people.