Blessed be God, indeed! If He were not our King; if anyone in heaven
or earth was Lord of us, except the Man of sorrows, the Prince of
sufferers, what hope, what comfort would there be? What a horrible,
black, fathomless riddle this sad, diseased, moaning world would be!
No king would suit us but the Prince of sufferers--Jesus, who has
borne all this world's griefs, and carried all its sorrows--Jesus,
who has Himself smarted under pain and hunger, oppression and insult,
treachery and desertion, who knows them all, feels for them all, and
will right them all, in His own good time.
Believing in Jesus, we can travel on, through one wild parish after
another, upon English soil, and see, as I have done, the labourer who
tills the land worse housed than the horse he drives, worse clothed
than the sheep he shears, worse nourished than the hog he feeds--and
yet not despair: for the Prince of sufferers is the labourer's
Saviour; He has tasted hunger, and thirst, and weariness, poverty,
oppression, and neglect; the very tramp who wanders houseless on the
moorside is His brother; in his sufferings the Saviour of the world
has shared, when the foxes had holes, and the birds of the air had
nests, while the Son of God had not where to lay His head.
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