The Cloud of Witness Tuesday

Good news (for me, anyway!) CM's Volume 3 is done, paraphrased in modern English!


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Tuesday.

Sympathy.

Weep not for Me, but weep for yourselves and for your children.--Luke xxiii. 27, 28.

A while ago I passed
Where every step seemed thornier and harder than the last;
Where bitterest disappointment and inly aching sorrow
Carved day by day a weary Cross, renewed with every morrow--
The heaviest end of that strange Cross I knew was laid on Thee;
So I could still press on, secure of Thy deep Sympathy.
F. R. Havergal.

There are hearts
So perilously fashion'd, that for them
God's touch alone hath gentleness enough
To waken,--and not break,--their thrilling strings!
F. Hemans.

One spring wind unbinds the mountain snow
And comforts violets in their hermitage.
Browning.

How feeble hath been all my Soul's essay
To aid one single man on all God's earth.
Buchanan.

And if a more auspicious fate
On thy advancing steps await,
Still let it ever be thy pride
To linger by the labourer's side;
With words of Sympathy or song
To cheer the dreary march along
Of the great Army of the Poor,
O'er desert sand, o'er dangerous moor!
Nor to thyself the task shall be
Without reward!
Lomgfellow.

The truest joys which we have experienced, have come when we had grace to enter most entirely into a sorrow not our own.
Westcott.