It was probably a hard saying to the Pharisees, that ‘there is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, than over ninety and nine just persons that need no repentance¹.’ And certain ingenious philosophers of our own day must surely take offence at a joy so entirely² out of correspondence with arithmetical proportion. But a heart that has been taught by its own sore struggles to bleed for the woes³ of another—that has ‘learned pity through suffering’—is likely to find very imperfect satisfaction in the ‘balance of happiness,’ ‘doctrine of compensations,’ and other short and easy methods of obtaining thorough complacency in the presence of pain; and for such a heart that saying will not be altogether dark. The emotions, I have observed, are but slightly influenced by arithmetical considerations: the mother, when her sweet lisping little ones have all been taken from her one after another, and she is hanging over her last dead babe, finds small consolation⁴ in the fact that the tiny dimpled corpse⁵ is but one of a necessary average, and that a thousand other babes brought into the world at the same time are doing well, and are likely to live; and if you stood beside that mother—if you knew her pang⁶ and shared it—it is probable you would be equally unable to see a ground of complacency in statistics.