In many private histories there are Gethsemanes. There are visitations of sudden, overpowering, ghastly troubles,--troubles that transcend all ordinary human sympathy, such as the helpless human soul has to wrestle with alone. And it was because in this blind struggle of life such crushing experiences are to be meted out to the children of men that Infinite Love provided us with a divine Friend who had been through the deepest of them all, and come out victorious.
In the sudden wrenches which come by the entrance of death into our family circles, there is often an inexplicable depth of misery that words cannot tell. No outer words can tell what a trial is to the soul. Only Jesus, who, as the Head of the human race, united in himself every capability of human suffering, and proved them all, in order that he might help us, only he has an arm strong enough and a voice tender enough to reach us. The stupor of the disciples in the agony of Jesus is a sort of parable or symbol of the inevitable _loneliness_ of the deepest kind of sorrow. There are friends, loving, honest, true, but they cannot watch with us through such hours. It is like the hour of death--nobody can go with us. But he who knows what it is so to suffer; he who has felt the horror, the amazement, the heart-sick dread--who has fallen on his face overcome, and prayed with cryings and tears and the bloody sweat of agony--he can understand us and can help us. He can send an angel from heaven to comfort us when every human comforter is "sleeping for sorrow." It was Gethsemane which gave Jesus the power to bring many sons and daughters unto glory.
And it may comfort us under such trials to hope that as he thus gained an experience and a tenderness which made him mighty to comfort and to save, so we, in our humbler measure, may become comforters to others. When the experience is long past, when the wounds of the heart are healed, then we may find it good to have drank of Christ's cup, and gone down in that baptism with him. We may find ourselves with hearts tenderer to feel, and stronger to sustain others; even as the Apostle says, he "comforteth us in all our tribulations, that we may be able to comfort them that are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God."