In Theodore Hunger's volume, "The Freedom of Faith," a book which will be found in many of our libraries, there is a chapter on the pity of Jesus Christ which would probably repay us for another perusal. Very powerfully the author maintains that pity is a deeper and sublimer passion than love. In "The Alchemist," Balzac, depicting an ideally perfect affection makes the object of it deformed, indicating that love has not attained its highest height until it has become pity. Thus the mother's love for her child is never so noble as when expressed in ministering to its sickness. How near to the little one does she come in those painful, anxious hours when, perchance, all the reward her love seems like to bring is the blighting of her dearest hopes. She loves her child in health, but that love is rewarded with joy; she loves it as it triumphs in its little tasks of intellect, but that love is rewarded with pride; its moral achievements awaken her admiration; its spiritual victories arouse her gratitude, and in admiration and gratitude, love has compensation; but none of these emotions so carry over her soul into fellowship with the soul of that dear one, none bring her into a touch so close, or give such gentleness to the fingers, such softness and tenderness to the voice as does pity, "when pain and sickness wring the brow." And what of the parental feeling for that other child--the child, we mean, whose name no one speaks in her ear, who has gone out from the family circle, who is away in the far country, wasting his substance in riotous living; who, indeed, _has_ wasted it, and who is now feeding the swine of the stranger, and longing to fill his belly with the husks that the swine do eat? Behold, now, the father standing upon the threshold shading his eyes as longingly he gazes along the road which climbs the distant hill. A world of trouble is in his eyes. "Yonder young fool who has wandered away is not worth a single sigh of this grand old man," we say. "He is reaping as he has sown," we moralise. Time was when this youth went brightly to and fro in the homestead, when innocence sat throned upon his forehead, when truth shone brightly from his eyes, when purity and modesty mantled with blushes his boyish cheek. The old man loved him _then_. But this watching from the threshold, this long, long tearful look down the road winding away to the land of profligacy and shame, these are the glories of his love. Here is _pity_. This is affection glowing in its fairest flower, its most precious fruit. Before us is a dim adumbration of the pity of God, the highest manifestation of His love for man. Similarly the pity of man for man is the highest manifestation of our love one for another. It is by pity, and by pity only, that humanity can be brought into true unity. It is by pity that the preacher comes into oneness with his congregation. There is a sense in which he comes nearer to his hearers through their sufferings