Studies in Character Author:Carol Norton Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: COMPASSION. "No one thing," wrote Henry Ward Beecher, "does human life need more than a kind consideration of men's faults./ Every one sins; every one needs f... more »orbearance. Their own imperfections should teach men to be merciful. God is merciful because He is perfect. As men grow toward the divine they become gentle, forgiving, compassionate. The absence of a merciful spirit is evidence of the want of true holiness. A soul that has really entered into the life of Christ carries in itself a store of enrichment and a cordial for helpless souls around it." Do we who profess to bear aloft the Christ standard of conduct sufficiently ponder the heart-searching, love-beggetting nature of the religion of our Master, its broad humanity, tolerant forbearance, temperate procedure, divine compassion, merciful, yet exact justice and philanthropy? It truly has its just and radical interpretation, but too long has this aspect of the Gospels been made the cardinal and only interpretation of the simple message of the Nazarene. Above all else it should be remembered that Jesus spoke from the depths of a humanly divine heart. Flesh of our flesh, he knew by the eternal law of sympathy what was in the heart of man, both good and bad, divine and human, strong and weak. He knew the temptations of the human mind, for never lived there a heart that sympathized more deeply and tenderly with sin-laden humanity than the over-flowing heart of the Galilean teacher. His enemies really paid him the grandest tribute he ever received when they scornfully said, "he was the friend of sinners." Never was there a character more above worldliness and impurity than his. Much of the time it must have meant physical and mental anguish for a man as sensitive as he was, to be so constantly at work among the depraved, the si...« less