though how the grandeur of that endurance was borne out by it none of them could declare to us. Pliny beneath the belching fires of Vesuvius tells us that he found his "miserable consolation" in the belief that it was the end of the world and all mankind was perishing with him, and in their secret souls all these great ones know that it is but a "miserable consolation" which can come to any creature out of the sufferings of others. That it is closely akin to pleasure in those sufferings some of the more honest of them would seem to have made out in their reflections upon our poor mortality. "I am convinced," said Burke, "that we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others," and that odious maxim-maker, Rochefoucauld, even goes farther and declares that "in the adversity of our best friends we always find something which is not wholly displeasing to us."

What more could all Hades ask than that to found its hells upon! And yet it is not an unnatural deduction from the accepted principle that misery loves company and finds its own ground of endurance in it. Indeed, the fear that our friends through too much prosperity will get out of the reach of us and our misfortunes is the gentlest explanation that is made of the hideous maxim, and the desire to bind them to us even in the bond of common woes is not largely discountenanced by the philosophers. In truth, community in suffering, perhaps in despair of community in joy, is so largely a part of poor mortals' demand upon each other that scarcely God could come to earth without declaring himself a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Pains, wrongs and all manner of ills are borne patiently if a whole community shares them together, and age, decay, death and oblivion are to be held tolerable, because, as one of our own poets puts it, "All that breathe shall share the destiny."

The crowning bitterness of life everywhere grows out of its, inequalities, and half the fires of war, anarchy and rebellion are kindled less for the pain men suffer, which in default of contrast they do not so much consider, as for fury of the fact that others refuse to bear it with them-push out of the common lot to what they deem the uncommon.

Some soul in fire that could look up and honestly rejoice that another soul was lying at peace in Abraham's bosom, and scorn the consolation that one creature was left to suffer with him, might revolutionize the whole scheme of purgatorial pains in earth or hades and show the angels a height of greatness that they are not competent to attain. Of course, teachers and mystics of different ages have sighted this glory afar off, and some of the blessed martyrs made a fair grasp for it, but one person alone really descended into hell to teach men the universal love that alone could compass it. For love and love alone is the secrt of rising above any consolation in others' afflictions which the odiously discerning philosophers find in us, and every true household is a proof of it. Imagine a son comforting himself over a fractured spine because his father or brother was similarly afflicted! Picture a fond mother finding consolation in the decay of her charms through beholding that a beautiful daughter was fading with her. Try Rochefaucauld's maxim on friends who had reached the Damon and Pythias stage of affection. Everywhere it is the poverty and dearth of love which that consolation of a common lot in sorrow builds upon, and one touch of the fire of a true affection shivers it at a breath.

Let universal love "lie like a shaft of light across the land" and all men's good be each man's care, and there will be small comfort in knowing that pains and bruises are spread over

the whole race. Even that incentive to courage which is supposed to lodge in the idea that if others have suffered and endured you can, is a small matter beside the strength of treading the wine press alone and rejoicing that others know nothing of its crimson deeps. Indeed, the truth of the matter is that it is one of our greatest misfortunes, instead of gains, that we are so tangled up in other people's lives that we can scarcely have the toothache without setting a whole family in commotion. To find a place where we could have

it out with ourselves when our souls faltered or our limbs failed would be much better than calling in a whole army of the halt and maimed to suffer with us. The lad in the mourners' seat who reproved the boy behind him for crying when it was “none of his funeral” had a measure of the right spirit in him after all. Sympathy may be well enough for the sympathizer, but strength to abide without it is better for the sufferer.

Most of all the form of consolation which looks upon the ten thousand woes and evils that men bring upon themselves as but a part of the common lot, as it were appointed of heaven, is the thing that blights. Heaven never asks any man to fracture his anatomy at either work or play, and if he does, it is small business to charge it to the general order and so pervert the kindlier ends of being. Pain is, as all the teachers tell us, the child of wrong doing somewhere, and to dispose of it as far as possible by right doing is certainly better than to declare it universal and take consolation in the worst form of it. Really joy is the only thing that men can afford to dwell upon as common, and it is significant that it was when the woman in the Bible had found, not lost, her piece of silver that she is made to call in the friends and neighbors to sympathize with her. It is due

to our misconception of life and its true bonds that sympathy and the "common lot" mean ever something dolorous, and that people scarcely think of them save in connection with some misfortune or damage to the original.

TELLING THE TRUTH

HE story of Jeanie Deans will have to be rewritten.

TH

The twentieth century has no use for the one-ideaed puritan maiden who would swear away a loved one's life rather than tell an inspirational lie to save it. The case has been tried in the criminal court of a large city, and not one member of the grand jury could be found willing to indict the trembling sweatheart who swore to a false alibi to save the man she loved from the penitentiary. However, the ends of justice are satisfied. The man has gone to the penitentiary, and, as the lie did not save him, there is no danger that a series of lover's perjuries will undermine the majesty of the law. The main thing needed in the case is a Walter Scott or a Tolstoi to put it in a romance, for if there is not a spiritual "resurrection" effected in that poor convict's soul through the power of that maiden's love, lie and all, then the angels are behind the jurymen in making the most of "the greatest thing on earth." When he saw his sweetheart sink back pale and trembling before the counter-testimony that threatened to expose her, he leaped to his feet, runs the record, and shouted aloud that he was guilty. Thus giving himself up, argued the jurymen, he met the demands of justice and removed any necessity for considering the poor girl's testimony. Hence their return was "no bill" when the effort came to indict her.

This closed the last act in the city court-room, but in the higher courts of the spirit it looks very much as though some new act had just begun. A Hugo or a Tolstoi would cer