Man of Sorrows

“ The reflection that when our sorrow has become too heavy for us to bear there is One mighty to save, Himself in His earthly career a “Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief,” who will strengthen us to support them, must console the deepest mental anguish; and we do not believe that any man has ever prayed truly and earnestly without receiving comfort from so doing. ”

“ There is but one pardonable grief—that for the departed. This pleasing grief is but a variety of comfort, the sighs are but a mournful mode of loving them.
There are sorrows too sacred to be babbled to the world, griefs which one would forbear to whisper even to a friend. Real sorrow is not clamorous. It seeks to shun every eye, and breathes in solitude and silence the sighs that come from the heart. ”

“ What gnawing grief, what hidden sorrows have you not been called upon to endure, from the death of your mother to the birth of your child! Who would ever believe such ills could reach one so envied, so admired, and so calculated to enjoy and impart happiness to others?"
"Oh, my lord, there are some sorrows so deep, so unapproachable, that for worlds we would not even have them suspected; and the severest increase of suffering would arise from the very doubt of our being the enviable creatures we are believed to be." ”

“ Passages of intense emotion—how caused I know not—are graven in my mind; memories of a grief that seemed to wrench the heart with present suffering, and cast shadows of darkest meaning on the future. Oh, no, no!—the sorrows—if they be indeed sorrows—of childhood are not short-lived; they mould the affections, and dispose them in a fashion that endures for many a year to come. ”

“ Take the sorrows of others to your heart; they shall widen and deepen it. Ours is a religion of sorrow. The Captain of our salvation was made perfect through suffering; our Father is the God of all consolation; our Teacher is named the Comforter; and all other mysteries are swallowed up in the mystery of the Divine sorrow. 'In all our afflictions He is afflicted.' God refuseth not to suffer;--shall we?"
There is no grave so desolate that flowers will not at last spring on it. Time passed with Albert and Olivia with healing in its wings. ”

“ This sorrow compares in dignity and terror with the most sublime sorrows of which humanity is capable. The death of a parent or child, though rendered more imposing to the spectator by the ceremonies of the sepulchre, does not chill the heart more deeply than the death of love. ”

“ I said, “if I may ask, do your opals stand for sorrows gone by or for sorrows to come?”
“You mustn’t be so literal,” she answered, “one can hardly label one’s sorrows like that. Sorrow is temperamental, not accidental; it is attitude rather than history; it comes even more from within than from without. Some natures attract it—as the moon draws the sea. ”

“ The sorrows which are the real tragedies are the sorrows which we carry in our hearts every hour of our lives, which stalk beside us in our days of happy carelessness, and add to the misery of our days of woe. ”

“ XXXVIII ONE does not really feel much grief at other people's sorrows; one tries, and puts on a melancholy face—thinking oneself brutal for not caring more, but one cannot; and it is better, for if one grieved too deeply at other people's tears life would be unendurable; and every man has sufficient sorrows of his own without taking to heart his neighbour's. ”

“ Shall a man grave his sorrows upon a stone when he hath but need to write them on the water? Nay, oh She, I will live my day, and grow old with my generation, and die my appointed death, and be forgotten. ”

“ Man is subject to innumerable Pains and Sorrows by the very Condition of Humanity, and yet, as if Nature had not sown Evils enough in Life, we are continually adding Grief to Grief, and aggravating the common Calamity by our cruel Treatment of one another. ”

“ Thou dost pierce the soul with untold sorrows, as well as thy bleeding victims with death. How many joyous hopes and bright prospects hast thou blasted; and how many hearts and homes hast thou made desolate! “As we think of the great wave of woe and misery surging over the land, we could cry out in very bitterness of soul—Oh God! ”

“ Never was there sorrow like unto this sorrow, wherewith the Lord now chastened him in the day of the fierceness of his anger. Upon his agony in the garden, an angel from heaven strengthened him. But in this hour, when he bore the sins of his people, when the pangs of death took hold of him, when the sorrows of hell encompassed him; in this hour of inutterable woe, where the heavenly messengers, and where was the countenance of his father who used to comfort him, and to smile upon him? Alas! from his Father proceeded those very sufferings, the severest of all which he was now experiencing. ”

“ What rage, what sorrow, boils thus in thy chest
That thou thus spend'st the night in wasting wo?
Oft help he gets that his hid ill doth Show.
Ay me! said I, my grief's not all mine own;
For all men's griefs into my heart do flow,
Nor men's alone, but every mournfull grone
Of dying beast, or what so else that grief hath shown.
From fading plants my sorrows freshly spring ”

“ I do not attempt to see thee, because thine is one of those solemn and sacred sorrows which each must suffer and conquer for himself. Dost thou understand what I mean to convey by these words, It is necessary to conquer sorrow—to conquer the least sacred, the least purifying part of sorrow, that which, instead of rendering the soul better, weakens and debases it? ”

“ And when we walked together, my Sorrow and I, people gazed at us with gentle eyes and whispered in words of exceeding sweetness. And there were those who looked with envy upon us, for Sorrow was a noble thing and I was proud with Sorrow.
But my Sorrow died, like all living things, and alone I am left to muse and ponder.
And now when I speak my words fall heavily upon my ears.
And when I sing my songs my neighbours come not to listen.
And when I walk the streets no one looks at me.
Only in my sleep I hear voices saying in pity, “See, there lies the man whose Sorrow is dead.” ”

“ Surely, however broad the view we take of the universe, a real woe, a veritable experience of suffering, amidst this boundless benificence, reaching as deep as the heart's core, is this old and common sorrow;—the sorrow of woman for her babes, and of man for his helpmate, and of age for its prop, and of the son for the mother that bore him, and of the heart for the hearts that once beat in sympathy, and of the eyes that hide vacancies with tears. ”

“ The worst result of all our vain misery is that it tempts us to forget Thee.
“But Thou knowest that it is all but a shadow which a glance from Thee can dissipate. Hast not Thou Thyself been a man? It was sorrow that made Thee God; sorrow is an instrument of torture by which Thou hast mounted to the very throne of God, Thy Father, and it is sorrow that leads us to Thee with our crown of thorns to kneel before Thy mercy-seat; we touch Thy bleeding feet with our bloodstained hands, for Thou hast suffered martyrdom to be loved by the unfortunate.” ”

“ But now to-day she had suddenly come on some of the footprints of the Man of Sorrow as He toiled over the mountains of earth searching for lost humanity, and her own heart echoed His love and sorrow for the world. ”

“ On thy lonely journey farest,
That understandest not nor carest
For me and my sadness!
Woe indeed! thou dost not know
Man cometh into this world in sorrow
To spend in grief to-night, to-morrow
In sorrow the third day to go! ”

“ Yet a few struggles, yet the throat-rattle, and the leaden hand of death choked the wounded man's last sigh, imprinted on his brow the seal of the last grief; gathering whole years of repentance into one rapid moment, in which the soul, tearing itself from the body, fears equally the tortures of life and of nothingness, feels at once all the gnawing of the past and all the agony of the future. ”

“ And he answered, "Is not sorrow a holy thing? Thou art the most sorrowful man in the whole world, for thou hast killed what was dearer to thee than life, and bitter is thy sorrow, and heavy is thy punishment." ”

“ And roll down bleared roads to each distance
Of past desolation and years;
Till they cover the place of each sorrow,
And leave you no Past and no morrow:
For what man is able to master
And stem the great Fountain of Tears?
But the floods of the tears meet and gather;
The sound of them all grows like thunder:
—O into what bosom, I wonder,
Is poured the whole sorrow of years?
For Eternity only seems keeping
Account of the great human weeping:
May God then, the Maker and Father—
May He find a place for the tears!
{170} LOVE AFTER DEATH. ”

“ The streams of sorrow flowed turbidly over the whole earth, and with unspeakable horror I saw that there was no room for God in this chaos which separated man from man. There was no room to manifest His strength, no spot to place His foot. Eaten up by the vipers of sorrow and fear, by malice and despair, by greed and shamelessness, all life was falling into ruin and man was being destroyed by discord and weakening isolation.
I questioned: "Art Thou not truly, O Lord, but a dream of the soul of man, a hope created by despair in an hour of dark impotence?" ”

“ But it’s a changeable world! When we consider how great our sorrows SEEM, and how small they ARE; how we think we shall die of grief, and how quickly we forget, I think we ought to be ashamed of ourselves and our fickle-heartedness. For, after all, what business has time to bring us consolation? ”

“ Oh, my brothers, this is the point of junction between those who think and those who suffer. This barricade is not made of paving-stones, beams, and iron bars; it is made of two masses,—a mass of ideas and a mass of sorrows. Misery meets then the ideal; day embraces the night there, and says to it, 'I am about to die with thee, and thou wilt be born again with me.' Faith springs from the embrace of all the desolations; sufferings bring hither their agony, and ideas their immortality. ”

“ And there the pent-up emotions of his spirit, which had gone through so tremendous a strain, broke up as in one terrible sob, when the strong man, like a tired child, "requested for himself that he might die." ”

“ The love of the Cross must swallow up our personal grief. Whoso does not suffer from love, for him sorrow is sorrow and grievous to bear; but whoso suffers from love he sorrows not, and his suffering is fruitful in God. Therefore is sorrow so noble; he who sorrows most is the noblest. ”

“ Wild grief and pain from the sores of body and soul, which were wearied in the struggle with stern life; intense sufferings from the wounds dealt to man by the iron hand of want—all this was invested in the simple, crude words and was tossed in ineffably melancholy sounds toward the distant, empty sky, which has no echo for anybody or anything. ”

“ The scourge that whips, the salve that cures offence;
Sorrow, my bed and home, while life hath sense.
Here solitary muses nurse their griefs,
In silent loneness burying worldly noise;
Attentive to rebukes, deaf to reliefs,
Pensive to foster cares, careless of joys;
Ruing life's loss under death's dreary roofs,
Solemnizing my funeral behoofs.
A self-contempt the shroud, my soul the corse.
The bier, an humble hope, the hearse-cloth, fear;
The mourners, thoughts, in black of deep remorse. ”

“ And thus is the Scripture fulfilled, “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.” For it is easy to believe, that though sorrow may precede this witness of God’s Spirit with our spirit; (indeed must, in some degree, while we groan under fear, and a sense of the wrath of God abiding on us;) yet, as soon as any man feeleth it in himself, his “sorrow is turned into joy.” ”

“ This late age of world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows; courage and endurance; a perfectly upright and stoical bearing. ”

“ But when the heart has been deeply and powerfully struck by some cruel blow of destiny, the intensity of suffering exceeds the bounds of sensibility and emotion.
Those who work hard seldom yield themselves entirely up to real or fancied sorrow. When grief sits down, folds its hands, and mournfully feeds upon its own tears, weaving the dim shadows that a little exertion might sweep away into oblivion, the strong spirit is shorn of its might, and sorrow becomes our master. ”

“ They can only have been the emotion and tears of One who saw, as massed in one black whole, the entire sorrows that affected physical humanity, and rose in a holy passion of indignation and of sorrow at the sight of that enemy, Death, with whose beginnings He had wrestled in many a miracle of restoration, and whose sceptre He was now about to pluck from his bony clutch. ”

“ O, spirits of Unrest and Pain! that grieve for the sorrow dealt out to weak humanity, sweep from my heart the dull veil of individuality, and let my being vibrate with the profound pulsation of those who mourn in the depths. Spirits of Sorrow and Sympathy, twin sisters of the twilight, touch the trembling chords that sound the symphony of wrong, and desolation, and despair. Almighty, God, in Thy wisdom, and surely also in Thy love Thou layest Thine awful finger on a poor human soul, and it is withered in Thy sight even to agony and death as far-seeing, our eyes may not discover. ”

“ For in the clear percipience of the Lord sorrow is ignorance and shameful.
“One thing only, monks, now as always I declare to you—sorrow and the uprooting of sorrow.”
For what man would wander in the mist of sorrow when he may walk glad and straight to the goal in the sunlight of wisdom. And sorrow understood is sorrow ended. ”

“ Sorrow is lord to man, and man a slave, None knows himself till he has walked with grief,— A cruel law, but none the less supreme, Old as the world, yea, old as destiny. Sorrow baptizes us, a fatal scheme; All things at this sad price we still must buy. The harvest needs the dew to make it ripe, And man to live, to feel, has need of tears. ”