Suffering Teaches Sympathy

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Jul 3, 1879

Suffering Teaches Sympathy

WE must suffer before we can sympathize, and when we have suffered our experience teaches us to be pitiful to others. We can handle best the sore of which we have felt the smart, and the burden which we ourselves have borne we can help to adjust on the shoulders of others with greatest knowledge of where the corners press. All the hardness of youth comes from want of experience; all the tender pity of age, the helplessness of maturity, comes from the foregone knowledge of pain. If sorrow does nothing else for us, it teaches us to be tender to others, and shows us how to alleviate by having taught us how to bear.