“The Vine from every living limb bleeds wine; Is it the poorer for the spirit shed? The drunkard and the wanton drink thereof; Are they the richer for that gift’s excess? Measure thy life by loss instead of gain; Not by the wine drunk, but the wine poured forth For love’s strength standeth in love’s sacrifice; And whoso suffers most hath most to give. * * * * * God said to Man and Woman, ‘By thy sweat, And by thy travail, thou shalt conquer earth,’ Not, by thy ease or pleasure:――and no good Or glory of this life but comes by pain. How poor were earth if all its martrydoms, If all its struggling sighs of sacrifice Were swept away, and all were satiate-smooth, If this were such a heaven of soul and sense As some have dreamed of;――and we human still. Nay, we were fashioned not for perfect peace In this world, howsoever in the next: And what we win and hold is through some strife.” And it was because our Lord knew this that He set over against men’s wills the strait door of the kingdom of life. He did not betray the trust that had been given to Him. He did not say, “Come, I will make life easy for you.” He did not say, “Come, let us indulge ourselves to heart’s content.” He said, “If any man will come after me, let him leave all that behind, let him deny himself, and let him take up his cross daily, and let him come after me.” Now, I know what many of us will be saying of all this. We will be saying, “God did not bring us into the world with any cross. All our life long has been a sheltered life. None of this hardness of which you speak has ever come to us. Maybe our fathers and mothers knew it before us, but they have shielded us from its pressure. Are we to go back to crudeness and asceticism for the good of our souls? Are we who have no cross deliberately to take our smooth lives and roughen them?” Yes, that is precisely what I am saying. Those of us who were not born with a cross must find one, those whose lives have been smooth are deliberately to find ways of roughening them, so that we may know a life of power and fellowship with the suffering God, and can go out to real work, and be prepared for that greater life and greater service which await us elsewhere than here. We shall not have any great difficulty in obeying this call of Christ to roughen our lives. There are many crosses in the world too heavy for the men and women who are trying to carry them. We can go out and find one of these crosses and help to bear it. They are not far away. Here is a clipping from the New York _Sun_: “A comely young Hungarian woman with a three-months-old baby in her arms dropped to the sidewalk at Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street late yesterday afternoon and lay half conscious. An ambulance surgeon who came said the woman was starving and that her baby had bronchitis.