baffled and beaten in life's fierce battle, bearing burdens of want and
wretchedness, and by the heroism of the past he urged all men
everywhere to fulfill that law of sympathy that makes hard tasks easy
and heavy burdens light. Let the broad shoulders stoop to lift the
load with weakness; let the wise and refined share the sorrows of the
ignorant; let those whose health and gifts make them the children of
freedom be abroad daily on missions of mercy to those whose feet are
fettered; so shall life be redeemed out of its woe and want and sin
through the Christian sympathy of those who "remember men in the bonds
as bound with them."

Rejoicing in all of life's good things, let us confess that in our
world-school the divine teachers are not alone happiness and
prosperity, but also uncertainty and suffering, defeat and death.
Inventors with steel plates may make warships proof against bombs, but
no man hath invented an armor against troubles. The arrows of calamity
are numberless, falling from above and also shot up from beneath. Like
Achilles, each man hath one vulnerable spot. No palace door is proof
against phantoms. Each prince's palace and peasant's cottage holds at
least one bond-slave. Byron, with his club-foot, counted himself a
prisoner pacing between the walls of his narrow dungeon. Keats,
struggling against his consumption, thought his career that of the
galley-slave. The mother, fastened for years to the couch of her
crippled child, is bound by cords invisible, indeed, but none the less
powerful. Nor is the bondage always physical. Here is the man who
made his way out of poverty and loneliness toward wealth and position,
yet maintained his integrity through all the fight, and stood in life's
evening time possessed of wealth, but in a moment saw it crash into
nothing and fell under bondage to poverty. And, here is some Henry
Grady, a prince among men, the leader of the new South, his thoughts