He finds that sorrow is an initiation into the hidden mysteries of life. Through its draped portals he enters the Temple of Sadness, there to learn “the elder truths, and the secrets that cannot be spoken.” He must be bathed in the fountain of tears and be branded with the blade of adversity before he is established in the novitiate of the order of Our Mother of Sorrows. Once admitted to her chosen band, he looks back without regret at his earlier and placid joys. His sorrow lives on within him as a new and indestructible force of character, expressing itself in added strength of will, clearness of perception, and breadth of sympathies. It has imparted to life another meaning, one more male and heroic, and yet tender, such as no pleasures can suggest or beget. The years may be paler, their flowers fewer, their grave-mounds more numerously strewn across his pathway; over them he steps with steady tread, his eye fixed on the work which he has learned is for him to do, asking neither about its rewards nor its results. This is the spirit of those teachers and lovers of their kind, who have taken as their own the sorrows of the race; it is the spirit of those martyrs to liberty who have fallen to free their country from the yoke of tyrants; and of those sufferers for truth’s sake who have been tortured and burned by the Churches rather than live by lying recantations. History constantly proves that the worthiest prizes of life, its loftiest virtues, and its most ennobling ambitions, are sold only at the price of suffering. The great world-religions, Buddhism and Christianity, began with proclaiming this final fact of life; and to its instinctive recognition by the experience of all mankind are due their conquests over the faiths which held out the allurements of material success and physical pleasure. The spirit of Christianity is the spirit of sadness. To it the house of mourning is ever better than the house of mirth. The Cross is the symbol of suffering; the steps are blood-stained that mount to Calvary; anguish and death are at its summit; for suffering and death are the signs, the admonitions, and the entrance to the Infinite. Art acknowledges the same inspirations as its highest. Sad emotions attract most potently because they arise from the unplumbed depth of the soul, and suggest its limitless dimensions. They attest the words of the poet, that “Man’s grief is but his grandeur in disguise.” There is always a strange attraction about scenes of suffering; the appetite is always keen “to sup full of horrors;” our emotions are more profoundly stirred by the spectacle of pain and anguish than by that of any imaginable pleasure.