“In order to sympathize with a person, it is not necessary to have had exactly the same affliction that he has. It is only necessary to have been afflicted. A different kind of affliction may make a man all the more sympathetic. Because Christ was sinlessly tempted, he feels a deeper and more tender sympathy with sinfully tempted man than he would had he been lustfully and viciously tempted. And this, for three reasons: (a) Lustful desire deadens the sensibility and blunts the tenderness and delicacy of the nature. (b) There is much selfishness in the sympathy of vice with vice, of one drunkard with another (“misery loves company”), but the sympathy of a benevolent temperate man for a drunkard is disinterested. (c) The strength and reality of sympathy are seen in the amount of self-sacrifice that one is willing to make for the miserable, rather than in the mere fact that one has felt precisely the same misery himself. Tested by this, Christ has infinitely more sympathy for man than any man has had or can have: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). One man may know very vividly from personal experience how another man feels and yet not be willing to undergo any suffering for him, for the purpose of delivering him from suffering. Drunkards have a common feeling of misery, but they do not make sacrifices for one another. On the contrary, they “bite and devour one another” (Gal. 5:15). Satan well knows from personal experience what remorse is and how his fellow angels suffer from remorse, but he has no disposition to help them at his own expense.” — W.G.T. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology (1891) 2:347-348