_INDURATION_

Though my heading is as old as Chaucer, it has, I must admit, a
Johnsonian sound. Its sense is conveyed in the title of an excellent
book on suffering called _Lest We Grow Hard_, and this is a very
real peril against which it behoves everyone

"Who makes his moral being his prime care"

to be sedulously on his guard. During the last four years we have
been, in a very special way and degree, exposed to it; and we ought
to be thankful that, as a nation, we seem to have escaped. The
constant contemplation, even with the mental eye, of bloodshed and
torture, has a strong tendency to harden the heart; and a peculiar
grace was needed to keep alive in us that sympathy with suffering, that
passion of mercy, which is the characteristic virtue of regenerate
humanity. I speak not only of human suffering. Animals, it has been
said, may have no rights, but they have many wrongs, and among
those wrongs are the tortures which war inflicts. The suffering
of all sentient nature appeals alike to humanitarian sympathy.

It has always seemed to me a signal instance of Wordsworth's penetrating
thought "on Man, on Nature, and on Human Life," that he assigned to
this virtue a dominant place in the Character of the Happy Warrior--

"Who, doomed to go in company with Pain,
And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train!
Turns his necessity to glorious gain";