On the influence of pain and suffering Baring-Gould has the following fine passage: "There was no necessity, some theologians have taught, for Christ to have died but as S. Bernard says, "perhaps that method is best, whereby in a land of forgetfulness and sloth we might be more powerfully and vividly reminded of our fall, through the so great and so manifold sufferings of Him who repaired it." Then quoting Oxenham: "'Pain is one of the deepest and truest things in our nature; we feel instinctively that it is so, even before we can tell why. Pain is what binds us most closely to one another and to God. It appeals most directly to our sympathies, as the very structure of our language indicates. To go no further than our own, we have English words, such as condolence, to express sympathy with grief; we have no one word to express sympathy with joy. So, again, it is a common remark that, if a funeral and wedding procession were to meet, something of the shadow of death would be cast over the bridal train, but no reflection of bridal happiness would pass into the mourners' hearts. Scripture itself has been not inaptly called 'a record of human sorrow.' The same name might be given to history. Friendship is scarcely sure till it has been proved in suffering, but the chains of an affection riveted in the fiery furnace are not easily broken. So much, then, at least, is clear, that the Passion of Jesus was the greatest revelation of sympathy: 'Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.' And hence fathers and schoolmen alike conspire to teach, that one reason why he chose the road of suffering was to knit us more closely to himself. For this he exalted his head, not on a throne of earthly glory, but on the cross of death. It is, indeed, no accident of the few, but a law of our present being, which the poet's words express: 'That to the Cross the mourner's eve should turn Sooner than where the stars of Christmas burn.' For in all, in their several ways and degrees, are mourners. The dark threads are woven more thickly than the bright ones into the tangled skein of human life; and as time passes on, the conviction that it is so is brought home to us with increasing force.' I (Oxenham: "Doctrine of the Atonement, 1869, pp. 290-292.)