Again, we are to notice that suffering brings us courage and broadens and deepens and intensifies our sympathies. “Pity makes the whole world akin,” and so quickens our consciousness of brotherliness. “At sea when the ship is in great peril the passengers crowd together, not because they can escape peril by facing it in company, but because they can gain courage by companionship. The sense of human kinship grows fresh and keen when men stand together in the face of a common danger.” It is therefore through suffering that men gain courage through a vivid realization of the brotherhood of man and the solidarity of the race. It often is as Dr. Mabie has said: “Through sorrowful ways men have climbed to the heights from which they now look into the heavens and over the landscape of life.” And this brings us to our final thought which is that suffering in some of its manifold forms gives that variety to life which is essential to the proper development of all the faculties of heart, soul, mind and body. By way of illustration, let us suppose that you could take from the public and private libraries of the world every book that contained a poem, a reference or a treatise touching the theme of sorrow, and what a dull, dead, gloomy monotony of uninspired literature would remain, while, in rather figurative language, the world itself could not contain the books thus mutilated and cast away. Apply the same test to art, and the galleries of the world would be destroyed, miles upon miles of bare walls would greet us at every turn as we made our heart-sick pilgrimage from gallery to gallery. Apply the same test to music, and you will never again hear the singing of a song with genius and power in it strong enough to stir the heart’s deepest emotions or to cause the soul to glow with a conscious ecstacy of faith and hope and the brain to burn with the fire of a high and holy resolution. The organ’s rich peal, the ring of stringed instruments, the wailing of the lute would lose the voice of melody, while “The Marseillaise,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “Dixie Land” and similar martial airs would never have found voice to speak for patriotic devotion or to chant the glory of a martyrdom for home or for country, had not the spirit of sacrifice and suffering pervaded them and given to them immortality.