COLUMBIA LIBRARIES OFFSITE 
 
 HEALTH SCIENCES STANDARD 
 
 HX64090078 
 RC73 .H59 1 890 The mystery of pain, 
 
 RECAP 
 

 " Copyright, 1886, 
 By Cupples, Upham, & Co. 
 
 Hst) 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 I HAVE been so far interested in this 
 little book as to suggest to the publishers 
 that a reprint would probably find a con- 
 siderable number of appreciative readers 
 among all classes of thinking men and 
 women. 
 
 It was published in England twenty 
 years ago ; and a small edition was sent to 
 this country, which readily found purchas- 
 ers. The book, at the time it appeared in 
 England, had a limited sale ; but since the 
 author's death a new interest has arisen, 
 and the work has been widely circulated 
 and read. 
 
 The author was for a number of years a 
 practising physician in London, and at- 
 tained much celebrity in his profession; 
 
 iii 
 
IV INTRODUCTION. 
 
 but he had a strong dislike to the empiri- 
 cism of the practice of medicine, which 
 Voltaire has defined as " putting medi- 
 cines of which we know little, into a body 
 of which we know nothing." Dr. Hin- 
 ton's mind tended strongly towards meta- 
 physics ; indeed, it may be truly said that 
 he was bom a metaphysician; and his 
 earliest writings show conclusively the 
 trend and nature of his thinking. He 
 abandoned the practice of medicine early 
 in middle life, and settled down in a tiny 
 house in London, devoting his time to 
 writing for the medical press, and in the 
 preparation of his books. He was poor, 
 and therefore forced to practise great 
 economy. He describes his house at Tot- 
 tenham as so small "that, seated in his sit- 
 ting-room, he could open the door with 
 one hand, poke the fire with the other, 
 and, had nature given him a third, could 
 
INTRODUCTION. V 
 
 have opened the window without the trou- 
 ble of rising from his seat." 
 
 In this narrow little house he wrote the 
 "Mystery of Pain," a book which has 
 comforted many a troubled soul, and awak- 
 ened the emotion of love in distressed 
 and doubting hearts. He was himself for 
 many years a sufferer from despondency; 
 and the intensity of his nature made him 
 a victim to much mental and physical 
 pain. He was absorbed constantly in 
 deep and exhausting thought ; and often 
 he would leave his desk in his little study 
 and plunge into the kitchen, seeking his 
 wife, to whom he would keep up such a 
 distracting blaze of metaphysics and phys- 
 ics, epicycles, parabolas, noumena and 
 phenomena, as to put an end to culinary 
 labors. 
 
 Dr. Hinton was, as this book clearly 
 shows, a deeply religious man ; and, what 
 
VI INTRODUCTION. 
 
 seems strange in such a nature, his relig- 
 ion v/as to a considerable extent of the 
 emotional kind. The cure for pain which 
 he brings to view rests on a religious 
 basis, and hence has no meaning or sig- 
 nificance to those destitute of religious 
 faith. 
 
 Perhaps the most interesting chapter 
 in the book is that devoted to a consid- 
 eration of the uses of pain. It is difficult, 
 hov/ever, to coincide in many of the 
 thoughts or views presented ; as they do 
 not meet the instances of suffering which 
 come under ordinary observation. We 
 find ourselves in darkness, unable to 
 answer irrepressible questions, even when 
 we extend our thought beyond self, and 
 endeavor to discern ends or designs which 
 are beneficent in their nature. It is not 
 often easy to discover any necessary con- 
 nection between our miseries and the 
 
INTRODUCTION. VII 
 
 good of Others remote from us ; but Dr. 
 Hinton insists upon this view. 
 
 There are, however, many good and 
 uphfting thoughts in the book, — -thoughts 
 which will not readily pass from the mem- 
 ory. The problem of pain is indeed dark 
 and not easily solved ; and if one is able 
 to point out rifts in the cloud, the world of 
 sufferers will welcome the light as rays 
 breaking through from the regions of rest 
 and bliss. 
 
 James R. Nichols. 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
PREFACE TO NEW EDITION. 
 
 LET us suppose that there existed an 
 island of which the climate was so 
 unhealthy that every one of its inhabitants 
 became in his infancy affected with rheu- 
 matism, causing all motion of their limbs 
 to be a source of pain. And let us sup- 
 pose, also, that this island had been with- 
 out communication with the rest of the 
 world, so that its inhabitants had never 
 come into contact with any people free 
 from their own affliction. They would 
 have found walking always a painful thing ; 
 the thought of it would be to them a 
 thought of pain ; and since we call things 
 that are always painful evil, they would 
 call walking an evil. But in this their 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 thought would be false. They would be 
 feeling a good thing painful because their 
 life was marred, and calling it evil only 
 because they did not understand their own 
 condition. And if it could be explained 
 to them that the cause of their pain was 
 not anything bad in walking, but only 
 their own disease, that itself would be a 
 gain to them. Even if the conditions of 
 their life could not be changed, it would 
 still be a benefit to them to know the true 
 source of their evil plight, and learn in 
 what direction they must look for real 
 relief. Besides, how many strange and 
 mysterious things in their life it would 
 make clear, to know that this walking, 
 which they dreaded, and called bad, was a 
 natural delight and good of man : what 
 vain endeavors it would save them from ; 
 what higher apprehension of possible de- 
 light in life, even for them, it would 
 afford. 
 
 Now this is like the idea I have tried to 
 explain in this little book; namely, that 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 things which we have inevitably called evil 
 may yet be truly good. My thought was 
 that all which we feel as painful is really 
 giving, — something that our fellows are 
 better for, even though we cannot trace it ; 
 and that giving is not an evil thing, but 
 good, a natural delight and good of man ; 
 and that we feel it painful because our life 
 is marred. 
 
 So far my thought now is the same as 
 when I wrote the book, but I have come 
 to see that it was incomplete. I was 
 thinking of painful things, and took no 
 account of pleasurable ones. What I said 
 in it was this : when a painful thing comes 
 to us, let us think, not of how it affects 
 ourselves, but of how it affects others. 
 Now I would add : when a pleasant thing 
 comes to us, let us think, not of how it 
 affects ourselves, but of how it affects 
 others. This is but making our regard 
 true to the facts around us, but it would 
 bring with it results of the greatest conse- 
 quence ; for the very nature of the duties 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 which lie upon us — our very right and 
 wrong — depends upon the question wheth- 
 er it is a thought of ourselves or of others 
 that moves us. When a man begins to 
 seek goodness, then the effect of having his 
 thought fixed upon self is seen : it falsifies 
 the very nature of right, perverting it from 
 being the simple following of service into 
 a question of restraining ourselves from 
 pleasure. So that any being who has suc- 
 cumbed to letting self stand first to him 
 has brought on himself a bondage which 
 he does not suspect, a need for banishing 
 pleasure which God lays on none of his 
 creatures. And therefore there is a deliv- 
 erance also possible for us from evils 
 which seem hopeless, because it may come 
 in a way we have not thought of, namely, 
 from the perception that, by submitting to 
 a false feeling, we have made our thought 
 of duty also false. To let regard to our- 
 self be first is to deform our right ; to 
 change it from being what it simply is — 
 our fellows' good — into a false thing, our 
 
PREFACE. 5 
 
 own restraint from pleasure. And where- 
 soever this is, there stands a deliverance 
 ready, an entrance, by the door of a truer 
 feeling, into a truer law. And this also is 
 what Christ has shown us. 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 'HPHIS book is addressed to the sorrow- 
 ^ fill. It may be there are some in 
 whose lives pleasure so far overbalances 
 pain, that the presence of the latter has 
 never been felt by them as a mystery. It 
 is probable that there are more who, 
 through native strength of mind or felic- 
 ity of circumstance, are able to meet the 
 questions that arise out of it v^/ith unop- 
 pressed hearts, and who have so strong a 
 faith in good that they can, without diffi- 
 cult}^ resolve all forms of evil into it. To 
 these I do not address myself; but there 
 is another, and, I think, a more numerous 
 class, to whom their own or others' pain 
 is a daily burden, upon whose hearts it 
 weighs v/ith an intolerable anguish. I 
 
 7 
 
8 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 seek to speak to these ; not as a teacher, 
 but as a fellow. Sharing their feeling, and 
 knowing well how vain is the attempt to 
 throw off misery, or to persuade ourselves 
 that life is better than it is, I would fain 
 share with them also some thoughts that 
 have seemed to me capable of casting a 
 bright gleam of light athwart the dark- 
 ness, and, if they are true, of bringing an 
 immense, an incredible joy out of the very 
 bosom of distress. 
 
 It seems to me, indeed, that nothing 
 less than this will suffice ; that pain must 
 furnish its own consolation, if it is to be 
 consoled at all ; or rather that it must 
 give more than consolation — that it must 
 give joy. If it can be made fruitful thus, 
 if a rejoicing can be seen to be rooted in 
 sorrov/, not sometimes onl}^, but abso- 
 lutely, then at least one part of the mys- 
 tery, and perhaps the hardest and the 
 darkest part, would be gone. And this it 
 is that I think I have seen, and that I 
 wish, if I can be so happy, to show to 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 those who need it more than myself, and 
 who better than myself may profit by it. 
 
 Let me beg the patience of one class of 
 sufferers, and their forbearance even, with 
 some of the thoughts which are herein ad- 
 dressed to another. No one, I think, can 
 have had much intercourse wdth those 
 v/ho have been called upon to suffer, with- 
 out feeling that there are two different 
 ways in which their pains most heavily 
 assault them. There are some in vv^hom 
 the fact that they and others are called 
 upon for endurance — yes, even the endu- 
 rance of unutterable pains — rouses no 
 angry questionings, and excites no doubts. 
 Their hearts may be bowed down to the 
 earth, but they do not murmur ; they 
 think it natural that the w-ays of God 
 should be beyond mortal fathoming, and 
 that what v/ould seem best to our narrow 
 vision could not be the truly good ; in 
 their deepest agony they do not question 
 righteousness. But there are others — I 
 think they are the more — the chief 
 
lO THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 poignancy of whose sufferings comes from 
 an irrepressible doubt of right, a burning 
 passion to penetrate the impenetrable 
 meaning of their anguish. They might 
 gird themselves up to endure, but they 
 cannot tolerate the unreason, the waste, 
 the seeming wrong. Their souls, which 
 might stand erect before the utterest tor- 
 tures which right could demand or reason 
 could inflict, writhe in impotent passion in 
 face of that cold, unanswering law which 
 wdll spare nothing, or that cruel caprice 
 which lays its sacrilegious choice upon the 
 best. What they demand is to see a right 
 and purpose in the loss and wrong. 
 
 It is a human cry, which surely God 
 does not despise. Is it not, indeed, a faith 
 ignorant of itself ? an assurance that there 
 must be in God's world a rig^ht, a r>erfect 
 reason, which would not balk our hearts 
 or mock our hopes if we could know it .'* 
 Surely we ought not to be impatient of 
 these demands, even when they are most 
 impatiently urged. Those who do not 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. II 
 
 feel them, or who have succeeded in hush- 
 ing them within their own bosoms, may 
 permit them to be weighed and pondered 
 to the full for others' sakes. Perhaps, too, 
 it may be found that these passionate 
 questionings do not lead us altogether 
 wrong ; that God's own spirit may be 
 prompting them, designing to meet them 
 with an answer ; that they may be, though 
 a faulty, yet an acceptable, fulfilling of the 
 precept : " For this thing will I be in- 
 quired of, saith the Lord." Do not our 
 Saviour's words encourage us to seek 
 knowledge as well as other gifts, when he 
 says, " I call you not servants, but I have 
 called you friends, for all things that I 
 have heard of my Father I have made 
 known unto you " .-* 
 
 If we knew all things that the Father 
 does, would our hearts be consoled ? 
 would our sorrows be turned into joy ? 
 Does not the secret anticipation of the 
 heart, in answer to this question, mark 
 the distinction of the believer and the 
 
12 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 faithless ? I believe that by such knowl- 
 edge sorrow would be turned into joy; I 
 think it may even be seen that it would ; 
 that we may have a knowledge now that 
 proves it. Accustomed as we have been 
 to be in darkness, and to bear sorrow un- 
 assuaged (debarred by loss and lapse from 
 our privilege as Christian men), have we 
 not almost forgotten that the Spirit is the 
 Comforter ; that the gospel claims, as one 
 of its chief ends, that we might have 
 great consolation ; that God has under- 
 taken Himself to wipe away all tears from 
 His children's eyes ; and that Christ, fore- 
 telling tribulation, has bidden us be of 
 good cheer } 
 
 Let us recall the joyful words ; let us 
 assure ourselves that they do verily ex- 
 press the truth ; let us be bold to believe 
 them, and, believing them, to look for and 
 to welcome all agencies by which they 
 are fulfilled. From whatever unexpected 
 quarters, or quarters most threatening and 
 hostile, there springs up consolation, may 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 1 3 
 
 we not believingly recognize it as God's 
 messenger, as His minister for fulfilling 
 His word ? Himself not unwilling to do 
 the consoler's part — nay, rejoicing most 
 therein — shall we wonder that He bends 
 all things to the same end, makes all re- 
 sults of human effort, all the long tale of 
 human strife. His ministers, to do for Him 
 His best and dearest work ; to give us joy, 
 such joy as His ; to transmute our life, and 
 make its dark threads translucent with the 
 splendor of a glory like His own ? 
 
 Can we wonder if all that man has 
 known or done has been working together, 
 unknown to him, indeed, but guided by 
 God's hand, to this end : coming to us now 
 as His ministers in our sore need, and 
 bringing refreshing waters to us when 
 we are thirsting unto death ? For surely 
 never was the healing water needed more 
 than now. Man has learnt many things, 
 but he has not learnt how to avoid sorrow. 
 Among his achievements the safeguard 
 against wretchedness is wanting. Per- 
 
14 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 UQaeeo, nc cumu scarceij^ dc charged 
 ^Bith es3g^ei:ation who should hold that 
 the aggregate of man's unhappiness had 
 inczeased with his incrcasiiig coltore, and 
 that the acoter sensibilily and mnltipKed 
 sources cS. distress more than outwagfa the 
 laxger aiea from which his pleasures are 
 drawn, and the more nnmerons means of 
 alleiTiation at his conmiand. At least, it 
 ^^peais certaii? tl^at tl:e "heajring up of en- 
 
 : i.::\r. -::::' I ^t^r' :: 1 5 reminded 
 
 :: '-'r-: \\-..:::y. i: :::^:'. r:.^:t. and proved 
 
 Z'yr.r:\\ ;.;: ;\ :::^:-. :;■ ^:::t:r-5l pleas- 
 
 c: ;. least to qtdet, c. : i:.^ r^ts^rt. 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN". 1 5 
 
 Man's heart is wounded in these latter 
 days ; the bright dreams of his youth have 
 vanished; the outpouring of his deepest 
 passion recoils on himself in mockery ; 
 but he can attire himself in gorgeous 
 apparel, and fare sumptuously every day. 
 He can lay all lands under contribution, 
 and make Nature serve his pleasures ; he 
 can even explore all knowledge — if he will 
 abstain from asking any question that it 
 truly concerns his manhood to have an- 
 swered. But surely it is not now an 
 open question whether pampered luxury 
 or gratified curiosity can heal a wounded 
 spirit. 
 
 If happiness is to revisit the earth, or, 
 if it have ever been a stranger there, is to 
 be strange no longer, it must come in the 
 form of a genuine joy of heart, a satisfac- 
 tion of our highest nature. It must come 
 surrounded with light, and bring hope in 
 its train ; it must bid our largest and 
 noblest affections spring up and blossom 
 anew. It must visit us as spring visits 
 
l6 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 the frozen lands, and make our life-blood 
 flow again with a warm current in our 
 veins. 
 
 And there are thoughts which would do 
 this ; thoughts which are possible to us 
 now : in some sense, indeed, now first pos- 
 sible to us, though open to all men since 
 Christ and His apostles preached. Old 
 thoughts, and yet new; as old as the gos- 
 pel, yet taught us with fresh evidence and 
 proof by the last discoveries of science, 
 which do but gather up the testimony 
 of Nature to that good news, and bid us 
 seek beyond the visible the secret of our 
 life. 
 
 It is true, indeed, that no change in our 
 thoughts can alter the nature of things, or 
 invert the essential relations of pleasure 
 and pain. No form of opinion can make 
 bitter sweet, or cause the couch of suffer- 
 ing to be a grateful rest. Yet let us ob- 
 serve what is true, on the other hand. It 
 is in the power of knowledge very radically 
 to determine our feelings, and sometimes 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 1/ 
 
 to make the same things in a high degree 
 pleasurable, or the reverse. Take, for 
 example, the case of hypocritical pretence 
 of friendship, and designing arts to pro- 
 cure our favor. Ignorant of their nature, 
 these pretensions (if not too gross) might 
 be sources of gratification to us ; but the 
 discovery of their true character makes 
 them in the highest degree repulsive, 
 nothing being altered but our knowledge. 
 A similar effect may be produced in the 
 opposite direction : the apparent aversion 
 or coldness of a beloved person may be 
 turned into a source of joy, if it be discov- 
 ered to depend upon a real regard. 
 
 It is in the power, therefore, of the dis- 
 covery of an unknown or unregarded fact 
 to alter our feelings — even to invert their 
 natural character ; to make unpleasing 
 that which is naturally pleasant, or to 
 render in the highest measure joyful that 
 which is naturally repugnant. This power 
 is in knowledge where there has been 
 ignorance. It does not alter our natural 
 
1 8 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 emotions : it still leaves (as in the cases 
 supposed) the manifestations of regard 
 agreeable in themselves, and the tokens of 
 aversion in themselves the source of pain ; 
 but it can overrule these primary tenden- 
 cies, eliciting feelings which are stronger 
 within us than the sensational impres- 
 sions. We may take another simple case : 
 The loss of a small sum of money is a 
 naturally painful thing ; few persons could 
 avoid a distinct emotion of annoyance from 
 its occurrence. But let a generous man 
 discover that through that loss a dear 
 friend has been largely benefited, and his 
 feeling is entirely changed ; the vexation 
 is lost in a stronger pleasure. 
 
 It is therefore evident that knowledge 
 might alter our whole feeling with respect 
 to the world. The apparent good and evil 
 of life constitute a case in vv'hich a truer 
 understanding- micrht invert the natural 
 
 o o 
 
 impression. We need not, therefore, be 
 hopeless in presence of the problem of 
 pain. Knowledge might alter its entire 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. IQ 
 
 aspect. Nay, we are not limited to this 
 general thought. For there is one condi- 
 tion under which all know that pain is not 
 truly an evil, but a good. This is when 
 pain is willingly borne for another's sake. 
 Its entire character is altered then. It 
 not only passes into the category of good 
 things, but it becomes emphatically the 
 good. Our life has nothing else so excel- 
 lent to show. All kinds of pleasure fall 
 infinitely below it. Measured by self-sac- 
 rifice, by heroism, every other good sinks 
 not only into a lower place, but becomes 
 evidently of a lower kind. Nothing else 
 in the same full and perfect sense de- 
 serves or receives the name of good. The 
 homage of all hearts unequivocally affirms 
 this title. Even when there is not man- 
 hood enough to imitate, when the baser na- 
 ture within us prefers the meaner course, 
 the verdict of the soul is never doubtful. 
 The pains of martyrs, or the losses of self- 
 sacrificing devotion, are never classed 
 among the evil things of the world. They 
 
' 20 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 are its bright places rather, the culminat- 
 ing points at which humanity has dis- 
 played its true glory, and reached its per- 
 fect level. An irrepressible pride and 
 gladness are the feelings they elicit : a 
 pride which no regret can drown, a glad- 
 ness no indignation overpower. Conceive 
 all martyrdoms blotted out from the 
 world's history ; how blank and barren 
 were the page ! 
 
 There are the materials, then, evidently 
 within us for an entire inversion of our at- 
 titude towards pain. The world in this 
 respect, we might almost feel, seems to 
 tremble on the balance. A touch might 
 transform it wholly. One flash of light 
 from the Unseen, one word spoken by 
 God, might suffice to make the dark places 
 bright, and wrap the sorrow-stricken heart 
 of man in the wonder of an unutterable 
 glory. 
 
 If all pain might be seen in the light of 
 martyrdom ; if the least and lowest in 
 man's poor and puny life — or shai] we 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 21 
 
 rather say, in God's great universe ? — 
 might be interpreted by its best and 
 highest, were not the work done? It is 
 done: for the light has shone, the word 
 is spoken. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 \ BRIEF narrative of my thoughts may 
 "^ ^ be allowed me, as the simplest method 
 I can adopt of giving them expression. 
 Some time ago, two feelings were forcibly 
 impressed upon my mind. On the one 
 hand, I was made conscious afresh of the 
 evil that is in man's present state; an 
 evil deeply affecting his whole being, and 
 demanding for its remedy nothing less 
 than a reconstruction and restoration of 
 his nature. And, on the other hand, I 
 was scarcely less impressed with the evi- 
 dence that there exists in all human 
 experience something unseen, some fact 
 beyond our consciousness, so that what is 
 the seeming of our life is not the truth 
 of it. 
 
 Neither of these thoughts is new. 
 They came with new force to my mind 
 
 22 
 
THE MYSTERY OF FAIN. 23 
 
 owing to particular lines of thought on 
 which I was engaged, which presented 
 them to me in fresh lights, and with 
 new evidence, making old words burn 
 with a new lustre ; but they are in them- 
 selves familiar truths. The radical need 
 of a change in human nature has been 
 affirmed by the best members of the 
 human race, as long as history records 
 the thoughts of men : with us it has 
 become mixed up with theologic doc- 
 trines, and so has been made the sub- 
 ject of verbal disputes; but it is itself 
 an old and native feeling of the human 
 heart. 
 
 And the belief that there is an unseen 
 fact beneath all that we are conscious of 
 
 — that there is something unperceived by 
 us which gives rise to all our experience 
 
 — also is not new; though it has lately 
 taken a more distinct form and place in 
 the human mind. 
 
 They are two old and customary 
 thoughts ; but the freshness with which 
 
24 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 they appeared to me enabled me to see 
 in them a relation which I had not per- 
 ceived before. That which suggested 
 itself to me was this : If man's nature 
 needs a change, and there is some fact 
 we are not conscious of causing our 
 experience, then may not this fact be 
 the working of that very change in 
 man ? 
 
 This thought assumed by degrees in 
 my mind the character of an assured 
 and manifest truth. It is the starting 
 point from which the thoughts contained 
 in this volume sprang : — 
 
 Our experience is the working out of 
 a change in man ; or, to speak in clearer 
 and more familiar terms, it is the carry- 
 ing out of man's redemption. 
 
 It is clear that if this thought could be 
 accepted as the truth, it would fulfil the 
 conditions for a complete change in our 
 thought of life. To connect all our ex- 
 perience with such an end would enable 
 us to read it entirely anew. For by giv- 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 2$ 
 
 ing to our pains a place of use and of 
 necessity, not centred on ourselves, but 
 extending to others, and indeed affecting 
 others chiefly, as existing for, and essen- 
 tial to, God's great work in the world ; — 
 by giving to our painful experience this 
 place, its whole aspect would be altered. 
 It would come within the sphere of that 
 pain which is capable of being the instru- 
 ment of joy; which exhibits the highest 
 good we can in our present state attain, — 
 the pain, that is, of martyrdom and sacri- 
 fice. Nor are we left indeed to rest 
 merely in this general thought : it comes 
 to us realized in the highest form, and 
 raises our souls to a height which might 
 seem too awful and too full of joy. For 
 so regarded, all our pains — all human 
 pain and loss — identify themselves, in 
 meaning and in end, with the sufferings 
 of Christ. He stands as the Revealer to 
 us of Human Life ; and the emotions 
 which His story awakens within us be- 
 come the pattern of those with which all 
 
26 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 distress may be encountered and every 
 loss accepted. 
 
 And surely we may at least say this : If 
 God would give us the best and greatest 
 gift, that which above all others we might 
 long for and aspire after, even though in 
 despair, it is this that He must give us, 
 the privilege He gave His Son, to be used 
 and sacrificed for the best and greatest 
 end. Nothing else could so fill our nature 
 or satisfy our hearts as this ; that Christ's 
 own life should be renewed. His work ful- 
 filled in us ; that we should be united with 
 Him so^ and feel the wonderful words of 
 St. Paul true of our own poor and blank- 
 seeming sorrows : " I fill up that which is 
 behind of the afflictions of Christ, for His 
 body's sake, which is the Church : " our 
 sufferings being related to an end that is 
 not merely ours ; an end that is of all ends 
 the greatest and the best. 
 
 For we are so made as to rejoice in 
 others' good, to find in it, indeed, our 
 highest joy, to rejoice, above all, in serv- 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 2^ 
 
 ing it. And if this thought of human life 
 is true, we see that the gospel addresses 
 man as constituted thus. Surely it should 
 do so. If it came to us on any other 
 ground, it would be addressing itself not 
 only to lower but to weaker elements 
 within us. It would pass by the worthiest 
 part of us, the part most kindred to itself. 
 For with what light does the gospel come, 
 what revelation does it make, but this, 
 that God's highest joy is in others' good t 
 nay, that His great heart is impatient of 
 their misery, and springs forward with an 
 eager haste to take it on Himself, finding 
 therein alone the means to make us know 
 
 Him. 
 
 When we look there, we can see why 
 God is the blest, the happy Being. We 
 should be happy if we had love, and found 
 for it such a work ; if we might take the 
 human sorrow, and bear it on our hearts, 
 and give our lives, too, and our sorrows for 
 the redemption of the world. If we might 
 undertake that work, a small, the smallest. 
 
28 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 part of it, and live for that and die for it, 
 that would be God's greatest gift to us. 
 
 His best gift, then, would be, not in our 
 pleasures but in our sorrows ; in our losses 
 and evils, not in our possessions or de- 
 lights. If this one fact of the use of our 
 lives by God in the redemption of the 
 world were true, the very foundations of 
 our life would be changed, the current of 
 our thought and feeling must pour itself 
 through a new channel. 
 
 The view, then, that I desire to suggest 
 rests upon these two thoughts : that there 
 is something accomplished in our experi- 
 ence which is unseen by us ; and that sac- 
 rifice for others is a good. For this unseen 
 work that is done through us is something 
 done for others. 
 
 With this view I think we shall find here- 
 after that both the facts of life and the con- 
 stitution of our own nature so -evidently 
 agree as to give it the greatest possible 
 confirmation. But I may first say a few 
 words respecting the demand which is thus 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 29 
 
 made upon us to recognize the existence of 
 an unseen fact in all that we experience. 
 
 It is evident that all the effects of the 
 events with which we are concerned 
 are not, and could not possibly be, per- 
 ceived by us. We see and feel things 
 — alike the great ones and the small 
 ones, as we esteem them — only as 
 they affect our senses ; that is, only in 
 small part and for a short time. They 
 soon pass beyond our sight, and while 
 they are within it they never show us all 
 they are, often those which are the great- 
 est seeming to us the least. How little 
 we are able, often, to calculate the influ- 
 ence even upon our own future of events 
 or actions of which we seem to have the 
 most perfect knowledge at the time. And 
 of the effects of these events on others, 
 which must go on, so far as we can esti- 
 mate, without any end, only the smallest 
 fragment is within our view. It is one of 
 the first lessons taught men by experience, 
 not to judge of events by what they seem, 
 
30 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 alone, but to remember that there may be 
 much more involved in them than appears. 
 To judge of our life, therefore, merely by 
 that which is seen of it, is to commit our- 
 selves to certain error. 
 
 So that the thought I have suggested, 
 that in all our experience there is some 
 unseen relation to spiritual things — to a 
 spiritual work in man — makes on us no 
 new demand. It is but the carrying out 
 to their legitimate, and surely to their 
 natural result, principles which experience 
 has established. We shall be sure to be 
 thinking and feeling falsely respecting our 
 life, if we cannot recognize some unseen 
 bearing of it. For we do not, we know 
 we cannot, see the whole. 
 
 And this principle is established not 
 only by experience ; it is the lesson which, 
 almost more than any other, science 
 teaches us also. In exploring the mate- 
 rial world, we soon find that, in order to 
 understand any part of it aright, we must 
 recognize things which are unseen, and 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 3 1 
 
 have regard to conditions or to actions 
 which do not come within our direct per- 
 ception. It is enough to instance the 
 pressure of the air, of which we have no 
 consciousness ; the motion of the earth, 
 equally unperceivablc by us ; the hidden 
 force, lurking in unseen atoms, of chemi- 
 cal affinity, or electricity ; the vibrations 
 which traverse the universal ether ; and, 
 in fine, that invisible unity which makes 
 all her forces one, whereby (holding to the 
 unseen) man has traced out in nature a 
 perfect order amid all confusion. 
 
 So far we have learnt that what we 
 directly and naturally perceive in the 
 things around us, and the events which 
 happen to us, was never meant to be the 
 guide to our thoughts respecting them. 
 A chief part of the value of science, in- 
 deed, consists in bringing into our knowl- 
 edge, and so into our practical use, that 
 which is not within our consciousness, and 
 which our senses can only indirectly, or 
 even not at all, perceive. Scientific 
 
32 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 knowledge consists in regarding the un- 
 seen ; in looking at things which are in 
 one sense invisible. It is therefore true, 
 because it fulfils this evident condition for 
 the attainment of the truth. 
 
 And thus, when it is said that all hu- 
 man experience is the working out of the 
 redemption of the world, the restoration 
 and perfecting of man's being, it is no 
 difficulty in the way, or evidence to the 
 contrary, that it is not visibly so. If this 
 seem like a difficulty, it arises only from 
 our natural tendency to limit our thoughts 
 by our impressions, and so to condemn 
 ourselves to error. That is the one source 
 of error from which all advance in knowl- 
 edge sets us free ; it is the one difficulty 
 which obstructs the road to truth. Refer- 
 ence is made to an unseen fact. It should 
 be so. If the fact were not unseen, it 
 could not be the truth ; for it would not 
 be freed from the limitations of our per- 
 ception. This does but bring the thought 
 into harmony with all our thoughts that 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 33 
 
 we have just ground for believing true. 
 And if a certain effort is demanded to 
 free ourselves from the dominion of our 
 own too small impressions, it is but the 
 same effort which is, or has been, the con- 
 dition of all knowledge. But here the 
 effort is not intellectual. We are not 
 called upon by great stretch of thought to 
 see relations in ordinary facts which no 
 common eye can see. We are not bidden 
 to follow causes to far distant and remote 
 effects. The demand is not for a larger 
 intellectual view, but for faith ; for that 
 which is the common and inevitable basis 
 of all religion, and is the foundation-stone 
 of Christianity. We have to recognize a 
 fact no human eye, indeed, can fully trace, 
 but which God reveals. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 A CONSIDERATION of the uses that 
 "^^ pain visibly serves in human life may 
 add weight to the thoughts that have been 
 suggested. For these uses, which have 
 been often dwelt upon, are by far too lim- 
 ited, even if they were otherwise adapted, 
 to give the key to its existence. Three 
 uses of pain are recognized, and, indeed, 
 cannot be overlooked : — 
 
 I. Bodily pain prompts us to many 
 actions which are necessary for the main- 
 tenance or security of life, and warns us 
 against things that are hurtful. It has 
 been often pointed out how largely that 
 which contributes to health is attended 
 with pleasure, and how constantly the 
 access or the causes of disease are accom- 
 panied by pain. Cold and hunger, for 
 example, lead us to feed and clothe our- 
 
 34 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 35 
 
 selves, and when excess begins there 
 come satiety and disgust. 
 
 These things are true ; but they exhibit 
 only one side of the facts. If pain is in 
 these respects often beneficial, it is also 
 often harmful ; and in almost all cases it 
 is liable to exceed, in an immense degree, 
 the amount which is needful to secure its 
 beneficial influence. The pain of many 
 diseases, by the exhaustion it produces, is 
 one of the chief sources of their danger ; 
 while in many cases, as in the abuse of 
 intoxicating drinks, it wholly fails to indi- 
 cate the most fatal perils. 
 
 And not only is life, in many cases, 
 crowded with useless or excessive pains, 
 but our sensibility itself seems to be more 
 developed for pain than for pleasure. Is 
 not our power of suffering in excess of 
 our power of enjoying ? Intense enjoy- 
 ment can last but for a short time, and 
 when once the limit of fatigue is reached, 
 the pleasure itself may become a source 
 of torture ; but pain may continue undi- 
 
36 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 minished, even growing in severity until 
 life itself succumbs. 
 
 Indeed, if we bring ourselves resolutely 
 to look at all the facts, are we not almost 
 compelled to feel that our nature — at 
 least our bodily nature — is constituted 
 rather for pain than for pleasure ? It is to 
 the former that it vibrates, if not most 
 readily, at least most intensely and most 
 protractedly. Nor can we overlook here 
 that strange law of our constitution by 
 which a comparatively slight pain will 
 spoil much happiness, and even turn what 
 should be pleasure into bitterness. 
 
 There is no adequate explanation, there- 
 fore, to be found of pain in the beneficial 
 effects which it produces in respect to our 
 physical existence. It serves these uses 
 — is benevolently meant to serve them, 
 doubtless, as our hearts irrepressibly 
 affirm — but it exists independently of 
 them. Its source lies deeper and its ends 
 are larger. 
 
 2. But, secondty, pain serves as a pun- 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 37 
 
 ishment for sin ; it follows wrong-doing, in 
 the forms of bodily disease or want, of 
 mental anguish or social vengeance. Suf- 
 fering is the minister of justice. This is 
 true in part, yet it also is inadequate to 
 explain the facts. Of all the sorrow 
 which befalls humanity, how small a part 
 falls upon the specially guilty ; how much 
 seems rather to seek out the good ! 
 Nights spent in dissipation bring ruined 
 health ; nights spent in fond watchings by 
 beds of pain bring a like and equal ruin. 
 To what sufferings children are subject, 
 and indeed all who are not able to pro- 
 tect themselves ! We might almost ask 
 whether it is not weakness rather than 
 wrong that is punished in this world? 
 
 Nor is there a wider basis for the idea 
 that physical pain punishes the violation, 
 not of moral, but of physical law. Not 
 to speak of the cruelty which thus inflicts 
 the last punishment upon the ignorant, 
 and treats misfortune as a crime, the rela- 
 tion is itself as partial as the others. No 
 
33 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 violated physical law can be sho\vn in 
 destruction by storm or earthquake, or 
 in the poverty which presses upon the 
 weaker members of a thickly peopled 
 country. Pain avenges the majesty of 
 violated law, physical and moral, but it 
 does not exist for this. 
 
 3. But there is another end which pain 
 fulfils, a vrorthier and more satisfying one, 
 perhaps, than either of those that have 
 been mentioned. It disciplines and cor- 
 rects the erring, chastens and subdues the 
 proud, weans from false pleasures, teaches 
 true wisdom. 
 
 Happily it does ; but only in some 
 cases. Unhappily it more often fails to 
 teach or to subdue. Often it hardens or 
 perverts. Pain is used for a discipline, 
 but can we say that it exists solely for 
 that end when those to whom it is no 
 blessing, but a curse, whom it rouses only 
 to bitterness, or sinks merely into despair, 
 have no exemption, and seem to plead in 
 vain for pity } Most often in this sad 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 39 
 
 world pain works, to our eyes, evil, and 
 not good; and where it works no good, 
 it often falls most heavily. Some other 
 source and reason must be found for pain 
 than the moral benefit it visibly brings the 
 sufferer. 
 
 And if neither of the uses we have thus 
 observed in pain can even seem to furnish 
 the reason for its existence, so neither can 
 they when taken altogether. There are 
 pains innumerable which benefit neither 
 the body nor the soul ; which punish no 
 moral wrong, which vindicate no material 
 law against voluntary breach. Take, for 
 one instance, the sufferings of industry 
 condemned to reluctant idleness, which 
 lead so often to discontent and bitterness 
 of heart. 
 
 All these we have enumerated are sec- 
 ondary purposes served by pain. They do 
 not conduct us to its source, nor reveal to 
 us its meaning. Neither does the fact 
 that the progress of man and the develop- 
 ment of his powers are prompted and 
 
40 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN, 
 
 maintained by the discomforts and evils 
 which he feels. For pain often paralyzes 
 instead of stimulating, and reduces to 
 impotence energies of the utmost value. 
 
 We iiaust, therefore, accept pain as a 
 fact existing by a deep necessity, having 
 its root in the essential order of the world. 
 If we are to understand it, we must learn 
 to look on it with different eyes. And 
 does not a different thousrht suo-srest itself 
 even while we recognize that the others 
 fail .'* For if the reason and the end of 
 pain lie beyond the results that have been 
 mentioned, then they lie beyond the indi- 
 vidual. Pain, if it exist for any purpose, 
 and have any end or use — and of this 
 what sufferer can endure to doubt ? — 
 must have some purpose which extends 
 beyond the interests of the person who is 
 called upon to bear it. For the ends 
 which have been mentioned include all 
 that concerns the individual himself. That 
 which surpasses these rises into a larger 
 than the individual sphere. From this 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 4I 
 
 ground it becomes evident again that, to 
 know the secret of our pains, we must look 
 beyond ourselves. 
 
 These uses of pain, which concern the 
 one who suffers only, must fail and be 
 found insufficient ; they ought not to be 
 enough, for they do not embrace that 
 which is unseen. Confining ourselves to 
 that which is visible to us, we ought to 
 find ourselves in darkness, unable to an- 
 swer irrepressible questions. But when 
 we extend our thought, and recognize not 
 only that there are, in pain, ends unseen 
 by us, but that these ends may not be 
 confined within the circle of our own in- 
 terests, surely a light begins to glimmer 
 through the darkness. While we look 
 only at that which directly concerns the 
 individual who suffers, no real explanation 
 of suffering, no satisfaction that truly sat- 
 isfies, can be found. But if we may look 
 beyond, and see in our own sufferings, and 
 in the sufferings of all, something in which 
 mankind also has a stake, then they are 
 
42 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 brought into a region in which the heart 
 can deal with them and find them good. 
 And if the heart, the reason also. For 
 here it is the soul that is the judge ; and 
 if the heart is satisfied, the reason also is 
 content. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 TTTE have noticed before how love is 
 * ' capable in some degree of overrul- 
 ing our natural feelings of pain, and of 
 making some things, that otherwise would 
 be painful, a source of joy to ourselves, if 
 they are productive of benefit to others 
 whom we delight to serve. When we 
 look into this subject farther, we see that 
 it is a law of our experience that our own 
 mental condition controls and even alters 
 our feelings. Though we speak of pleas- 
 ure and pain as fixed and definite things, 
 yet they are truly by no means fixed. It 
 is matter of familiar experience that vari- 
 ous circumstances may modify our sensi- 
 bility in repect to things which are, in our 
 ordinary state, painful. The power of 
 mental excitement in this respect is well 
 known. A soldier wounded during battle 
 
 43 
 
44 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 may feel no immediate suffering from the 
 severest injury; and we have everyday 
 proof of the same thing in the failure of 
 slight accidents to pain us when we are 
 intently occupied. All strong emotions, 
 indeed, seem to have a similar power. It 
 can scarcely be doubted that martyrs have 
 sometimes gone through their flaming 
 death in ecstasy. And the accounts we 
 have of that fanatical sect in the East, 
 one part of whose devotions consists in 
 working themselves first into a frenzy, 
 and then laying hold on glowing iron, 
 dancing with it in their hands, and put- 
 ting it to their lips, indicate not only an 
 absence of pain in the act, but even some 
 kind of pleasure. 
 
 It would seem, indeed, that there is 
 nothing that can be said to be always or 
 necessarily a cause of pain. What we can 
 truly say on this point is, that there are 
 certain things which are painful to our 
 bodily senses when these are not con- 
 trolled or modified by the state of the 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 45 
 
 mind. It is as truly our nature not 
 to feel pain from the ordinarily painful 
 things at some times, as it is to feel them 
 painful at others. In this respect, the 
 power of love to take away pain is not 
 peculiar. Love, when it is strong, can 
 banish pain ; but in this it is only like 
 all strong emotions : it is peculiar in its 
 power of making what is ordinarily pain- 
 ful a source of joy, and this a joy of the 
 highest and most exquisite kind. We all 
 know this. We not only are willing, we 
 rejoice, to bear an ordinarily painful thing 
 for the benefit or pleasure of one whom 
 we intensely love. Within certain limits, 
 indeed, but still most truly, the bearing 
 pain for such an end is a privilege to 
 be sought, not a sorrow to be shunned. 
 Universal experience proves this : it is 
 one of the broad familiar features of 
 human life. 
 
 But when we consider this, do we not 
 see that our natural feelings mislead us 
 when they pronounce pleasant things to 
 
45 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 be the good ones, and the painful ones 
 evil ? So far from this being the case, 
 things that we call painful, that are pain- 
 ful in our ordinary state, are essential 
 conditions of our highest good. To us, 
 there could not be love without them. 
 We could never have felt the joy, never 
 have had even the idea, of love, if sacri- 
 fice had been impossible to us. In our 
 truest and intensest happiness, that which 
 is otherwise felt as pain is present. Pain, 
 we may say, is latent^ in our highest state. 
 It lies hidden and unfelt in the form of 
 devoted sacrifice ; but it is there, and it 
 would make itself felt as pain if the love 
 which finds joy in bearing it were absent. 
 Take, for example, the offices rendered 
 with joy by a mother to her babe : let 
 the love be wanting, and what remains ? 
 Not mere indifference, but vexation, labor, 
 annoyance. A gladly accepted pain is in 
 the mother's love ; it is in all love that 
 does not contradict the name. To take 
 away from us the possibility of that which 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 47 
 
 we feel as pain were to take its best part 
 from life, to render it almost — surely 
 altogether — worthless. The possibility 
 of love is given to us in our power of 
 sacrifice ; and loving brings the power 
 into immediate action. 
 
 To beings constituted as we are, the 
 possibility of love can be given only 
 through the power of sacrifice. Our 
 highest happiness consists in the feel- 
 ing that another's good is purchased by 
 us, that we — our labor or our loss — are 
 the instrument through which it is con- 
 ferred. Take away that element, and the 
 joy alters its character, and becomes inevi- 
 tably less. We may still rejoice and be 
 glad in the good fortune of the beloved 
 object, but we can no more rejoice in 
 giving it at our own expense. 
 
 In our best happiness, then, what we 
 otherwise term pain is swallowed up. It 
 is embodied and mixed up in the joy. For 
 do we not despise and loathe a man whose 
 only thought in that which he calls love is 
 
48 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 of the pleasure he can receive? And, 
 further, by taking away the love, its sacri- 
 fices would be felt as pain : pain emerges, 
 or comes out, from this joy by a taking 
 away, or absence. And its presence, to 
 one who should be loving, might imply no 
 evil state around him, but only something 
 wanting in himself. For the very same 
 things may be to us either painful, or in 
 the highest degree productive of delight, of 
 a delight which could not be without them. 
 Remembering these things, then, what 
 should we consider the presence of pain in 
 the world to mean ? Does it not mean 
 that there is a want in man by which that 
 becomes painful which should be joy ? 
 Does it not mean that a world in which so 
 much of pain is present, is adapted — was 
 altogether made — to be the scene of an 
 overpowering, an absorbing love ? One 
 element of the best happiness is given, 
 namely, sacrifice : what does it imply but 
 that the other should be present too } — 
 the other, which is love. 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 49 
 
 Let us think, then, of ourselves : our 
 natural feeling prompts us to exclude all 
 painful things ; to found a bliss upon their 
 absence. But is not this an utter error, 
 and were not its achievement fatal ? 
 Surely a truer knowledge lays its fullest 
 and intensest grasp upon the painful ele- 
 ments of life, and holds them as the funda- 
 mental conditions of its joy. The reason 
 we are made, or seem as if we were made, 
 for pain, is that we are made for love ; the 
 predominance of sacrifice is a sign and 
 proof upon how good a plan the world was 
 formed ; upon how high a type of bliss. 
 Cur feeling it as pain, proves something 
 w^anting in ourselves. 
 
 Doubtless we are right to loathe and 
 repudiate pain, and count its endurance an 
 evil. To be happy is good : to feel pain is 
 evil, and the sign of evil. God meant us 
 for the one, meant us to abhor and shrink 
 from the other. But the question is, What 
 is the happiness God has meant us for, the 
 happiness to which human nature is fitted, 
 
50 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 to which it should aspire ? Should it be 
 that from which the painful is banished, or 
 that in which pain is latent? Should pain 
 be merely absent, or swallowed up in love 
 and turned to joy? 
 
 Surely we can answer but in one way. 
 To wish the former were to choose the 
 lesser good, to cut ourselves off from our 
 chief prerogative. If God truly loved 
 man, must He not have made him such 
 that by want of love pain should arise ; 
 and that to him — ignorant and unloving 
 as he is — the world should be one dark 
 mystery of sorrow ? How else should He 
 have made us capable of joy, how else 
 have made earth tolerable in the eyes of 
 heaven ? — in the eyes of that heaven 
 which gazes on the Lamb that has been 
 slain, and sees, unamazed, in Him the 
 brightness of the Father's glory, the ex- 
 press image of His person. 
 
 For if in the only worthy joy (the only 
 happiness which, matching the dignity of 
 man or filling his capacity, rightly de- 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 5 1 
 
 serves the name of human), if in this there 
 is necessarily latent the element of pain, 
 so that by an absence it must be felt; — if 
 in human joy pain is absorbed and taken 
 up, not merely excluded or set aside, then 
 we at once rise in our thoughts above our- 
 selves. If this is our joy, then it is His 
 also in whose image we were made. The 
 pain that is latent in man's bliss is latent, 
 too, in God's ; in His most as He is 
 highest : and that great life and death to 
 which the eyes of men are ever turned, or 
 wandering ever are recalled, reveals it 
 to us. 
 
 We see it must be so. If God would 
 show us Himself, He must show us Him- 
 self as a sufferer, as taking what we call 
 pain and loss. These are His portion ; 
 from eternity He chose them. The life 
 Christ shows us is the eternal life. He 
 emptied Himself, and the pain became 
 manifest ; He put off His perfection, and 
 the sorrow was hidden and lost in the ful- 
 ness of His life no more. It was revealed 
 
52 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 as sorrow, becoming visible to human 
 eyes ; piercing the immortal heart before 
 a breathless world, which, seeing Him, 
 sees and knows the Father. 
 
 Thus our own experience may solve for 
 us the problem, how God is incapable of 
 suffering, and yet reveals Himself to us 
 as a sufferer. The seeming contradiction 
 here is only that which the intellect en- 
 counters in everything that is true of our 
 own life. Love cannot be explained, made 
 manifest of what nature it is, the secret of 
 its happiness revealed, except by an exhi- 
 bition of the toil, the abnegation, the sacri- 
 fice, that are in it. Seeking for happiness, 
 craving for good, we grasp at pleasure and 
 turn away from pain. God must teach us 
 better, and to do so He shows us the root 
 and basis of His own. Stripping off His 
 infinitude, and taking infirmity like ours. 
 He bids us look and see ! The only happi- 
 ness He has, or can bestow, bears martyr- 
 dom within it. If He does not suffer, it is 
 only that His life is perfect ; His love haa 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 53 
 
 no hindrance, no shortcoming, and can 
 turn all sacrifice to joy. He stands our 
 great example, not exempting Himself 
 from toils and sacrifices which He lays on 
 us, binding heavy burdens, and grievous 
 to be borne, upon men's shoulders. Him- 
 self not touching one ; but with so large a 
 heart accepting them, that they are trans- 
 figured into the very brightness of His 
 glory, and our dim eyes cannot discern 
 them, save as they are shown us with the 
 brightness veiled, the glory banished, the 
 love itself subdued to a less burning flame. 
 Revealed therein in strong crying and 
 tears, that recall our own experience to 
 ourselves. He makes us know with which 
 part of it to link His name. It is sacrifice 
 binds us to God, and makes us most like 
 Him : sacrifice that to us is sorrow, want- 
 ing life and love ; but to Him, supreme in 
 both, is joy. 
 
 And when we say pain is an evil, we 
 can only rightly mean that our feeling it to 
 be pain is an evil. That marks defect and 
 
54 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 want, failure of our proper manhood, short- 
 coming from our privilege of joy. From 
 pain we may well seek and pray to be de- 
 livered ; but by what deliverance ? It may 
 be banished in two ways — by taking away, 
 or by adding. Pain may be removed pas- 
 sively by the removal of that which is its 
 cause, letting us relapse into mere repose, 
 which may seem joy by contrast, or by the 
 deadening of the sensibility, that shall 
 banish alike pain and pleasure. But it 
 may also be removed actively, positively ; 
 not by the absence of the cause nor by 
 diminished feeling, but by a new and 
 added power, which shall turn it into joy 
 — a joy like God's. 
 
 In the presence of pain the basis is laid 
 of an exquisite delight ; should we not 
 seek it ? Should we not believe that God 
 will give it } If the thought seems too 
 great for us, is it not therefore more be- 
 fitting Him, more like what we have learnt 
 of Him ? And if He must nevv^-create us 
 in order to give us happiness like this, has 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 55 
 
 He not promised to create us anew ? Nay, 
 do we not find here confirmation of His 
 promise, finding our need for its fulfil- 
 ment ? 
 
 Since love, then, is in sacrifice, we see 
 that to creatures such as we are, failing of 
 our manhood, pain must be. We see that 
 our Maker, assuming our condition in 
 order that we may know Him, also as- 
 sumes, and miust assume, our sorrows, pre- 
 eminent therein. We see, too, that deliv- 
 erance from pain must be wrought out 
 within : it must be by a change of life, and 
 not of circumstance. However the latter 
 may be altered, till love itself shall change, 
 this fact can never alter — that only in 
 the form of that which we call sacrifice 
 can our true good be given us. Whatever 
 else may pass or change, of this we may 
 be sure, that till God cease to love us we 
 shall stand face to face with sacrifice. Of 
 this, as of our Maker's presence, we may 
 say, " If I ascend into heaven, thou art 
 there : if I make my bed in Hades, behold, 
 
56 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 thou art there. If I take the wings of the 
 morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts 
 of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead 
 me, and thy right hand shall hold me " ; 
 (or where God is, there is love. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 npHESE thoughts have been made 
 -*- clearer to my own mind by some 
 others which our common experience has 
 suggested to me. My attention was first 
 drawn to them in this connection while 
 engaged in gardening, and feeling how 
 essential a part of the pleasure which that 
 occupation gave was furnished by the 
 slight inconveniences which it involved. 
 Without the latter, I felt that the employ- 
 ment would have wanted very much of 
 its zest. The little claim upon the endu- 
 rance constituted a real part of the charm. 
 As I became conscious of this fact, it was 
 natural to go on to reflect how completely 
 it seems to be a law of our nature, that, 
 in order to be thoroughly enjoyable and 
 to continue so, our life must include more 
 or less of willingly accepted inconvenience. 
 
 57 
 
58 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 This inconvenience may be, in most cases, 
 slight, but still (with some exceptions, 
 which I shall refer to presently) it seems 
 to be in all cases necessary. There is 
 inconvenience overcome, endurance ac- 
 cepted, to some extent, in every life that 
 is permanently pleasurable ; and this, in- 
 dependently of all moral considerations, 
 merely by the nature of our constitution. 
 We see this fact strikingly exhibited in 
 field sports, and in every kind of active 
 amusement. It reaches its height, per- 
 haps, in the pleasure found now so widely 
 in ascending mountains, which seems to 
 be a really painful task ; but the same ele- 
 ment is found almost universally in sports. 
 Look at the roughness and fatigue of 
 cricket, the toil, and even pain, of a hard 
 day's boating. Nay, how much less 
 charm were there even in a picnic, if it 
 were not for its inconveniences and little 
 denials. 
 
 But these are only special instances of 
 a law that seems to be universal in our 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 59 
 
 experience. Whether it may seem para- 
 doxical or not, it is a fact in our nature 
 that, without endurance, life ceases to be 
 enjoyable ; without pains accepted, pleas- 
 ure will not be permanent. For the most 
 part, among intelligent persons, this fact 
 is so fully accepted and acted upon, that 
 they are hardly conscious how universally 
 it is true. They take their inconveniences, 
 accept their little pains — let us say, for 
 example, the rising at a reasonable hour in 
 spite of sloth, or the free use of cold 
 water in spite of the shock — and reap 
 their reward accordingly in a healthful, 
 pleasurable life. But the law becomes 
 evident immediately in its breach ; it 
 asserts itself inevitably against the at- 
 tempt to avoid it. A life from which 
 everything that has in it the element of 
 pain is banished, becomes a life not worth 
 having ; or worse, of intolerable tedium 
 and disgust. There is ample proof in the 
 experience of the foolish among the rich, 
 that no course is more fatal to pleasure 
 
6o THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 than to succeed in putting aside every- 
 thing: that can call for endurance. The 
 stronger and more generous faculties of 
 our nature, debarred from their true exer- 
 cise, avenge themselves by poisoning and 
 embittering all that remains. A striking 
 illustration of this fact is given in the 
 words reported to have been uttered by 
 Lord Queensbury as he stood looking at 
 the scene from Richmond Hill: — "Oh, 
 that wearisome river ! It will keep run- 
 ning, running, and I so tired of it." * 
 
 But the records of luxury in all ages 
 furnish a long succession of similar 
 instances. And the whole principle is 
 embodied in the now universally recog- 
 nized doctrine of the necessity of work — 
 itself an irksome thing — for happiness. 
 
 This is the thought that occurred to 
 me : In our healthful and natural life 
 endii-rance is essential to pleasure. Our 
 enjoyment, by the very construction of 
 our nature, absorbs and takes into itself as 
 
 * Mrs. Trench's Memoirs. 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 6 1 
 
 a necessary element a certain amount of 
 pain ; that is, of what would, if it stood by 
 itself, be pain. But when we recognize 
 this fact, we can hardly help remarking 
 another also. The amount of endurance 
 or pain that our pleasure will thus absorb, 
 and turn into its own sustenance, is not 
 fixed. It varies, being in some cases more 
 and in some less ; and especially it varies 
 with the intensity and perfectness of the 
 life. A strong and healthy person can 
 absorb into his pleasure a really large 
 amount of what would otherwise be pain, 
 that of a hard day's hunting or rowing, or 
 the ascent of a considerable mountain ; or 
 he will enjoy a great amount of risky as 
 we read in the life of Stephenson, that 
 the navvies in his day preferred the most 
 dangerous tasks. A weak person can 
 enjoy much less — fatigue or discomfort 
 soon spoils his pleasure ; but a sick per- 
 son, one in whom the bodily life is de- 
 praved or wanting in its perfectness, can 
 
62 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 enjoy none. His pleasure can absorb no 
 endurance at all. He must be shielded 
 from all that is painful, from all that taxes 
 — and to the strong man so delightfully 
 taxes — the power to bear. The pains 
 which are the very conditions of enjoy- 
 ment to the healthy man, become to him 
 intolerable, utterly unendurable and ter- 
 rible. He must be laid upon a soft bed, 
 guarded from every shake or jar, from 
 every call upon his powers, from all loud 
 sounds, or brightness even of the light. 
 He can find pleasure only in that which is 
 itself unendurable to the healthy man, the 
 absence of all exertion. 
 
 For when we 2:0 on to consider the facts 
 in this connection, we see that the sick 
 man finds intolerable, not only that ele- 
 ment in healthy pleasure which demands 
 endurance, and might be regarded as in 
 itself painful, but that every kind of action 
 (speaking generally) is painful to him. 
 The natural exercise of the powers, which 
 is the very source of healthy pleasure, is 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 63 
 
 his agony. His whole feeling is inverted ; 
 that which is properly pleasure, and ought 
 to be pleasure to him, is become his tor- 
 ment, and no effort can render it other- 
 wise. 
 
 Accordingly, in all our dealings with a 
 sick man, and in all his thoughts respect- 
 ing himself if he is capable of thinking 
 truly, this inversion of his natural condi- 
 tion is recognized. It is remembered that 
 what is properly pleasurable is painful to 
 him, and that his pleasures are in things 
 that should be to him worse than indiffer- 
 ent. When he is promised perfect enjoy- 
 ment, he does not look forward to the 
 perfecting of the kind of pleasure which 
 he needs in his sickness, or of the ease 
 which he then desires ; not to perfect rest, 
 to beds so soft that his limbs cannot ache 
 upon them, or food that shall nourish with 
 no demand upon the vital energy. He 
 looks forward to a change in his own 
 capacities whereby his enjoyment shall be 
 made different. 
 
64 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 In being promised ease, he is promised 
 health ; that is, to be able to find enjoy- 
 ment, the true enjoyment of a man, in 
 that which is pain to him, it may be intol- 
 erable and overwhelming pain, in exertion 
 and endurance. He is to be delivered, by 
 an increase or perfecting of his life, from 
 pain, but by no means from all the things 
 he feels as painful. The only possible 
 condition of a true enjoyment is, that he 
 shall find it in things that to him are pain- 
 ful ; his only true deliverance is in an 
 added power. 
 
 Now this thought, which sprang so nat- 
 urally from our everyday experience, con^ 
 nected itself at once with the thoughts 
 that have preceded. Is not man sick, fall- 
 ing short of his perfect life, and therefore 
 feeling as pain that which is the rightful 
 condition of his joy ? 
 
 It is true, mankind are subject to pains, 
 of body and of mind, which oftentimes are 
 overwhelming, utterly beyond endurance, 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 65 
 
 which no effort, no philosophy, can render 
 otherwise than insupportable. The woes 
 which surround human life often seem as 
 if they could not be exaggerated ; they 
 seem to admit of no consolation, no alle- 
 viation. We cannot rejoice in them ; we 
 cannot rise above them. They penetrate 
 our very hearts, and undermine the very 
 sources of our strength. But though all 
 this is true — though human misery is 
 immense — it does not follow that the 
 whole of it is not rightly the instrument 
 and source of happiness. We see, in 
 bodily disease, that our feeling certain 
 things utterly and intolerably painful, may 
 arise not from evil in the things them- 
 selves, but from want of a perfect life in 
 us ; they may be the very conditions of 
 natural and healthful pleasure. 
 
 And if we accept the thought of man as 
 sick, does not the whole fact of human 
 wretchedness, the heavy total of the pains 
 of men, stand before us in this new light ? 
 
66 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 Do we not receive (a joyful gift) a per- 
 fect inversion of our thought respecting 
 it ? All pains may be summed up in sac- 
 rifice ; and sacrifice is — of course it is — 
 the instrument of joy. To health, to life, 
 it is so. If it is not so to us, what does 
 that mean, but that we are sick ? 
 
 Man's life, his true and proper life, his 
 health, is of such grandeur, of such in- 
 tensity and scope, that it would absorb, 
 and turn into the servitors of its joy, all 
 that we now find intolerable pain, all 
 agony and loss. Man's life is measured 
 by his pains. It is such life, so large, so 
 deep in consciousness, so rich in love, that 
 in these sacrifices it can find its joy, its 
 perfect satisfactions, its delights. These 
 utter losses, and unfathomable miseries, 
 and cruel strokes that leave us nothing, 
 are its pleasurable efforts, its rejoicing 
 gifts, its glad activities. So far short we 
 fall; and so vast and glorious is the true 
 human life. To apprehend it we must 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 6/ 
 
 *■ — " I ■■■ I ■ ■ ■ i — — ■ ■■ I. ■■ ■! ■ . ■ ■■ I .1. , 
 
 measure it by its pains, that is, by its 
 capability of sacrifice. Man's being is 
 cast on that scale, planned to that magni- 
 tude ; it claims that intensity : a scope 
 and an intensity that should make the 
 uttermost evil and sacrifice to the self — 
 intolerable evils to us now — but as the 
 healthful exercise, the hearty toil, that 
 make the limbs throb with exuberance of 
 life. 
 
 So glorious is man*s true being ; so high 
 we should elevate our hopes. The life we 
 shall receive is such as would make all 
 sacrifices joy, even those extremest ones 
 from which now we shrink most utterly. 
 These things God hath prepared for them 
 that love Him. It is true the height 
 staggers our thought, and almost forbids 
 our faith. Yet why should we shrink 
 from it } Are we not to be joined with 
 Christ in His glory ; and is any height 
 of joy in sacrifice, of power to give and to 
 be glad in giving, too great for Him ? 
 
6S THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 And surely this thought of man's great- 
 ness is only like those new thoughts of 
 greatness which the study of God's works 
 everywhere enforces on us. Not less than 
 immeasurably short of the reality fall all 
 our natural thoughts of the Creator's 
 works ; as in respect to nature, so also 
 in respect to man. He, too, is unuttera- 
 bly greater than we believed, unutterably 
 greater than we can conceive. But then 
 God made him ; how, therefore, can any 
 thought be too high or glad ? Man's per- 
 fect life could use all suffering for joy; 
 that is, a love for others should be so 
 powerful within us, and a consciousness of 
 others' good should be so fully ours, such 
 rapture should possess us, that all loss, all 
 griefs, should be to us the trivial sacrifices 
 which love delights to have the oppor- 
 tunity to make. That they are not so 
 now reveals the condition of the sick man, 
 who needs, not ease or pleasure from with- 
 out, but health within. 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 69. 
 
 The evil of our pains should make us 
 say, not how evil is this that we are called 
 upon to bear, but how far short we fall — 
 man falls — of the true human life, that 
 this sacrifice is an evil to us. It should 
 prompt us to seek deliverance, but deliv- 
 erance by cure : the deliverance that is 
 brought by a perfected life ; the joy that 
 is the joy of love, and finds its necessary 
 food in sacrifice. Any other thought of 
 happiness, any other anticipation or desire, 
 any anticipation that puts aside the sacri- 
 fice, is as if a sick man should desire, not 
 restoration, not the power of enjoying 
 effort and absorbing endurance into pleas- 
 ure, but only soft and easy couches, rest 
 and shaded light. This is to fall short in 
 our desires, to make disease our measure, 
 to demand a life that is not life, pleasures 
 that are not truly pleasure. Must we not 
 aspire higher } Must we not seek, desire, 
 anticipate, a happiness that is in giving ; a 
 life that is so wide, and high, and full, that 
 
70 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 it can take up, nay, must take up, all that 
 is utterest sacrifice to us, and make it the 
 very condition of its rejoicing energy? — a 
 life to which it would be as impossible to 
 use our poor self-pleasures, except for sac- 
 rifice, as it would be to health to lead the 
 life of sickness. 
 
 The whole thought is involved in the 
 fact that devotedness and self-giving are 
 the conditions of the joy of love ; and that 
 without love the life that love leads joy- 
 fully were full of pain. Man's perfect life 
 is a life in which love can be perfect, and 
 find no limitation ; it is a life so truly lived 
 in others, so participant with them, that 
 utter and unbounded sacrifice is possible ; 
 the limitations of this mortal state bound- 
 ing us no more. It is the life of heaven. 
 But the thought need not be left vague. 
 Dp not the words of Scripture, which 
 speak of the union into oneness of those 
 who constitute the Church of Christ, sup- 
 ply to it a definite basis ? Are we not to 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. /I 
 
 share a life wider and deeper than we now 
 seem to possess ; a life co-extensive with 
 Christ's body, in the great joy of which all 
 loss and sacrifice of self is swallowed up ; 
 the self remaining to us, indeed, only as 
 purified and ennobled into the means of 
 sacrifice ? * 
 
 Is not this, then, the standard of human 
 life ? Such life as would make all the 
 bitter pains, the unutterable losses and 
 overpowering agonies of man, the means 
 of a glad service, the rejoicing offerings of 
 love ? We must reckon, not the pains too 
 great, but our life marred. It is not dark, 
 but the brightness of a day that over- 
 whelms our fevered eye. But make us 
 whole ^ and joy will banish pain. 
 
 * If this idea should seem obscure, it may be suffi- 
 cient to recall to our thoughts the representations given 
 in Scripture of the Divine Being, as dwelling, and act- 
 ing, and living in the creatures whom He regenerates. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 WE can return now to the subject 
 which forms the foundation of the 
 thoughts that have been expressed ; namely, 
 the redemption of man. If we recognize a 
 want in our own nature, a condition like 
 that of disease, making us feel pain in that 
 which should be joyful, we feel at once 
 that we have need of a deliverance, need 
 of a cure. And seeing that this condition 
 of want or disease affects not individuals 
 only, but the whole human race, we feel 
 that Man needs a restoration, a perfecting 
 of his life. Man's nature, appearing as 
 diseased, claims a restorer; appearing as 
 the victim of a perverted feeling, which 
 subjects it to evil, it needs to be redeemed 
 from this. 
 
 Now this is the thought to which refer- 
 ence has been made in the idea of the re- 
 
 72 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 73 
 
 demption of the world. That redemption 
 is the raising up of man from the evil con- 
 dition in which he feels sacrifice as pain, 
 into a condition in which it is felt as joy, a 
 condition of true and perfect life. 
 
 Thus the idea stands in a definite light 
 before us. This is the change which 
 man's nature needs : this is the change 
 which it is receiving. The redemption of 
 man, as I have spoken or shall speak of it 
 here, means this change; a change not 
 only of his feelings and will, but of his 
 actual state. I seek to regard all our 
 experience in its relation to this work; 
 in the part which they bear in it I find the 
 glory of our pains and the consolation of 
 our griefs. 
 
 For if this work is being done, it is 
 necessarily being done in all human ex- 
 perience ; or rather, this experience of 
 ours is that very work itself. Strange 
 and unlike it as they may appear, these 
 events which bring us joy or sorrow, per- 
 plexity or pleasure, gain or loss ; these 
 
74 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 things in which we are actively engaged, 
 or which are passively inflicted on us ; 
 these are the carrying out of this work 
 in man. So that we may take up each 
 one of our pains and sorrows, and say, 
 " Man's redemption is carried out in this, 
 is effected through it, demands this to 
 be." It is no matter that it is so discon- 
 nected, so useless, so utterly insignificant. 
 Nothing is disconnected ; nothing that 
 moves man's spirit and rouses his ca- 
 pacity of feeling is insignificant ; nothing 
 that is linked — as all events are linked 
 — inseparably into the great history of 
 man, is useless. If man's redemption is 
 a fact, it is the fact of these experiences 
 that may seem so small and objectless; 
 the unseen fact of them, they seeming 
 small only because it is unseen. 
 
 The evidence that this work is accom- 
 plished is drawn, of course, from the 
 declarations of Scripture, which affirm 
 a salvation bestowed on man, and to be 
 wrought out in him ; which promise that 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 75 
 
 he shall be made alive in Christ, and 
 receive an eternal life. And here I may 
 briefly say that to my own mind the lan- 
 guage of the New Testament appears 
 unequivocally to affirm the redemption 
 of all men ; their actual redemption from 
 this evil and diseased state in which we 
 now are: the actual raising up of all to 
 a perfect life. To my own mind this 
 universality seems to be clearly expressed 
 in Scripture, and to give an unutterable 
 delight to life. But it is not necessary 
 that this should be believed in order for 
 us to receive the happiness which the 
 knowledge that our sufferings serve their 
 part in the great work of redemption 
 gives. That happiness may still rest 
 upon their serving the good of others, 
 though not all may share that good. In 
 the words before quoted, St Paul says, " I 
 fill up that which is behind of the afflic- 
 tions of Christ, for his body's sake, which 
 is the Church." He does not say in this 
 passage, as in so many others he at least 
 
76 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 appears to say, that the sphere of Christ's 
 Church shall finally include the whole 
 human race. And the happiness which 
 flows from this thought may be shared by 
 those who can believe it true of their own 
 sufferings, even though they think that 
 those on whose behalf God uses them are 
 but a part and not the whole of men. 
 
 On this point I may venture one re- 
 mark. It seems to me that great difficul- 
 ties have been rightly felt in recognizing 
 in the language of Scripture any clear 
 assertion that all men shall be brought 
 to Christ, and spiritually made alive 
 through Him. There is much which, 
 with thoughts such as ours have been, 
 seems very expressly to affirm the con- 
 trary. But it appears to me that a chief 
 source of these difficulties has been our 
 own corruption. As we are now, we feel, 
 and cannot help feeling, that of the two 
 evils, pain and sin, pain, if it be extreme, 
 is the greater. By nature we fear suffer- 
 ing more than sinning. Now, reading 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. f) 
 
 the New Testament with this feeling 
 operating on our thoughts- — as we are 
 sure to do unless we are expressly on 
 our guard against it — we can hardly fail 
 to misunderstand its language, and to 
 think of suffering or loss where it speaks 
 of sin. So reading it, we may well see in 
 its words mere hopeless ruin as the des- 
 tiny of a large part of men. But if we 
 keep watch over ourselves here, and re^ 
 member that only he whose very life is 
 death can feel suffering worse than sin, or 
 could speak as if it were ; if we remember 
 that God's chief warnings, therefore, must 
 be against, not what we fear most, but 
 against that which, perhaps, we do not 
 fear at all, the words of the New Testa- 
 ment present themselves to us in a new 
 light. And the apparent meaning of 
 many passages that we may easily recall, 
 which speak as if Christ's kingdom were 
 to embrace each member of the human 
 race, telling us that He will draw all men 
 to Him ; that every kneg shall bow in His 
 
78 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 name ; that God shall be all in all ; — the 
 apparent meaning of these passages may 
 grow clear to our purged eyes as the true 
 burden of the gospel. We may be able, 
 giving an awful force to all its threaten- 
 ings, to take to our gladdened hearts — 
 our hearts made warm with a new life — 
 its large and joyful words, which speak of 
 a salvation achieved for all, in all to be 
 fulfilled ; a salvation of which one chief 
 and most essential part consists in the 
 very remedy of this perverted feeling. 
 For when man finds only joy in sacri- 
 fice, there can no more be any evil felt 
 by him as worse than sin. Sin, indeed, 
 would stand as the one sole evil felt or 
 capable of being felt by him, and in this 
 would not his redemption be fulfilled .-* 
 
 But while the belief that a redemption, 
 a new creation of his nature, is being 
 worked out in man, rests primarily and 
 essentially on the New Testament, yet it 
 has other evidences which may well add 
 strength to our conviction. True, it is a 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 79 
 
 work that is unseen, a fact that cannot be 
 made visible to the eye of sense, a fact 
 which, save for its revelation in Christ, 
 could not have been discovered. Yet 
 evidences of it may be found in many facts. 
 Surely in the very constitution of our 
 nature, made as it is for sacrifice, con- 
 structed to find its chief joy only there, feel- 
 ing, even in its degradation, that no other 
 joys are fully worthy of it, proof is given 
 that man is designed and destined for a 
 life proportioned to his powers. 
 
 And do not the very pain and loss by 
 which man is surrounded, if we read them 
 rightly, testify to the same thing? Not 
 accidentally, not arbitrarily, do these as- 
 sail him. They are rooted in the essential 
 conditions of his being ; they are insepara- 
 ble from the structure of the world, and 
 the relations which he bears to it. The 
 individual must be sacrificed and suffer 
 loss. It is his inevitable lot; the total 
 order of nature must be altered ere he 
 could escape it. The necessity for sacrifice 
 
80 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 is built into the structure of our being ; it 
 is the birthright, the inalienable inheri- 
 tance of life. What, then, can we say of 
 it, but that it foretells and promises a 
 state of being and a mode of life to which 
 it shall not be alien and hostile ; a life in 
 which it shall exist as a kindred and 
 friendly element, and to the fulness of 
 which it shall be minister, as we know it 
 may be. Must not the inevitable existence 
 of pain and loss, to us, mean this ^ 
 
 And human history, when it is closely 
 scanned, confirms the thought. Dark and 
 unmeaning as it looks, this at least is 
 visible in it, that without sacrifice no per- 
 manent satisfaction or truly good result is 
 suffered to be attained. Incessantly man 
 aims at ends which do not involve self- 
 abandonment ; incessantly they are denied 
 to him ; or, when gained, deceive his hope. 
 Satisfaction is withheld ; the best founded 
 hopes prove vain ; the highest powers fail ; 
 experiments on which the brightest expec- 
 tations have been founded fall in ruin ; no 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 8 1 
 
 lesser end suffices ; but, by failure and dis- 
 content, man is driven ever onward. If we 
 ask ourselves, To what goal ? can we not 
 well foresee the answer? He is driven 
 onward to this : to accept loving sacrifice 
 as his good. 
 
 These facts are evident in human life 
 even as it is : that man is framed for joy in 
 sacrifice ; that until it can be made his joy, 
 sacrifice must be his torment, for it never 
 can be banished ; that without the willing 
 acceptance of sacrifice, no end is really 
 answered in human life, no satisfaction 
 that is worthy of humanity achieved. Add 
 to these things the known fact that our 
 nature is imperfect, and the promise given 
 of its renovation, and does not their mean- 
 ing become manifest .?— that man's re- 
 demption is the end for which this present 
 human life exists, the unseen end which it 
 achieves. 
 
CHAPTER VII.* 
 
 TF we recognize that our feeling in re« 
 •^ spect to sacrifice is inverted, and, as in 
 sickness, the very condition of our rightful 
 joy is become the source of pain, we see 
 that our thoicght has also been perverted ; 
 we have judged of good and evil falsely. 
 And thus does not light arise upon us, a 
 light in which we cannot but rejoice.-* Do 
 not two mysteries disappear : the mystery 
 that God reveals Himself in Christ, taking 
 suffering and death to show Himself to 
 us ; and the mystery of the pain and sor- 
 row of which our life is full } Seeing 
 what God's joy is, we see why Christ 
 alone can reveal Him. The nature of the 
 joy that is in love cannot otherwise be 
 shown than in taking sacrifice, and bear- 
 ing sorrow. To reveal God there must 
 
 * This chapter is partly a recapitulation. 
 82 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 83 
 
 have been presented to our eyes a Man of 
 Sorrows, who chose and willingly em- 
 braced our griefs ; for we feel that to be 
 sorrow which is the very basis of His life 
 and blessedness. 
 
 Nor could our human life be otherwise 
 than full of sorrow too. We are dealt 
 with — most happy those who most are 
 dealt with so — according to the nature of 
 our manhood, not according to our false 
 feeling of it ; according to the true good, 
 not according to our perverted desires. 
 Our good is secured in the felt loss ; for 
 our nature is larger than we feel : our 
 ends are most subserved when most we 
 feel them set at naught, for our destiny is 
 higher than we know. The best is given 
 us, though we would choose the worse : 
 the basis of the largest and highest happi- 
 ness, though we would choose the lower 
 and the less. We are sacrificed, unwilling, 
 for others' good, unseen : but it is no mys- 
 tery that we are so ; because in willing 
 sacrifice for others' good, known, seen, 
 
84 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 and felt even as His own, lies God's own 
 blessedness ; the blessedness of all who 
 truly can be blest. The broken remnants 
 of the perfect life of joy are these : these 
 pains, these multiplied and dire distresses, 
 these clouds which to us veil the heavens 
 in despair. Nor are they remnants only ; 
 they are germs from which the perfect 
 life may grow ; they are the omens of 
 victory and delight ; the basis upon which 
 is to be built up a joy for which they 
 cannot be too great. Of all that could 
 not be spared from our life, our sacri- 
 fice is that which could be spared the 
 least. 
 
 And that there is a perversion of man's 
 feelings and desires, a radical want in our 
 nature, is a known fact, proved long ago, 
 and resting on evidence which needs no 
 fresh confirmation. The disease of hu- 
 manity has written its proofs on every 
 page of history, has engraved itself indeli- 
 bly on the human heart. The fact is 
 already known, and we are justified there- 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 85 
 
 fore in using it to guide us. For his full 
 life and happiness, man must be changed : 
 we know it well. Surely, then, this 
 change, to which we must look forward, 
 may be one that shall make sacrifice his 
 joy. Nay, for his perfect holiness and 
 bliss, it must be so. For unless sacrifice 
 is joy, holiness beyond temptation, and 
 happiness without a sorrow, cannot be. 
 
 But if it thus proves itself to the reason 
 that pain is sacrifice, and is good felt as 
 evil through disease, it proves itself still 
 more to the heart. Nothing can make 
 pain so good as that it should be borne for 
 others. So it becomes a privilege. And 
 this is the inevitable demand of the human 
 heart when it seeks for consolation. Even 
 the natural feelings of men, unaided by 
 that revelation of life which shows us this 
 consecrated sorrow as its central fact, have 
 often risen to confidence in the belief, and 
 to happiness and strength based on it. 
 The thought is beautifully expressed in the 
 following passage by the Emperor Marcus 
 
S6 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 Antoninus, showing that even in darkness 
 and insufficiency, it is yet native to the 
 soul : — 
 
 "Just as we must understand when it is 
 said that ^sculapius prescribed to this 
 man horse exercise, or bathing in cold 
 water, or going without shoes ; so we must 
 understand it when it is said that the 
 nature of the universe prescribed to this 
 man disease, or mutilation, or loss, or any- 
 thing of the kind. For, in the first place, 
 * prescribed' means something like this: 
 he prescribed this for this man as a thing 
 adapted to procure health ; and, in the 
 second case, it means, that which happens 
 to (suits) every man is fixed in a manner 
 for him suitably to his destiny. For this 
 is what we mean when we say that things 
 are suitable to us, as the workmen say of 
 the squared stones in walls or the pyra- 
 mids, that they are suitable when they fit 
 one into another in some kind of connec- 
 tion. For there is altogether one fitness 
 (or harmony). And as the universe is 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 8/ 
 
 made up out of all bodies to be such a body 
 as it is, so out of all existing causes neces- 
 sity (destiny) is made up to be such as it 
 is. And even those who are completely 
 ignorant understand what I mean, for they 
 say, It (necessity, destiny) brought this to 
 such a person. This, then, was brought, 
 and this was prescribed to him. Let us, 
 then, receive these things, as well as those 
 which ^sculapius prescribes. Many, as 
 a matter of course, even among his pre- 
 scriptions, are disagreeable, but we accept 
 them in hope of health. Let the perfect- 
 ing and accomplishment of the things 
 which the common nature judges to be 
 good, be judged by thee to be of the same 
 kind as thy health. And so accept every- 
 thing that happens, even if it seem disa- 
 greeable, because it leads to this, to the 
 health of the universe, and to the pros- 
 perity and felicity of Zeus (the universe). 
 For he would not have brought on any 
 man what he has brought, if it were not 
 useful for the whole. Neither does the 
 
88 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 nature of anything, whatever it may be, 
 cause anything which is not suitable to 
 that which is directed by it. For two 
 reasons, then, it is right to be contented 
 with that which happens to thee ; the one 
 because it was done for thee, and pre- 
 scribed for thee, and, in a manner, had 
 reference to thee, originally from the most 
 ancient causes spun with thy destiny ; and 
 the other, because even that which comes 
 severally to any man is to the power 
 which administers the universe a cause of 
 felicity and perfection, nay, even of its 
 continuance. For the integrity of the 
 whole is mutilated, if thou cuttest off any- 
 thing whatever from the conjunction, and 
 the continuity either of the parts or of the 
 causes. And thou dost cut off, as far as 
 it is in thy power, when thou art dissatis- 
 fied, and in a manner triest to put any- 
 thing out of the way." * 
 
 And this feeling that the true consola- 
 
 * " The Thoughts of the Emperor Marcus Anto- 
 ninus : " translated by George Long, p. 65. 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 89 
 
 tion in distress must be found in its use 
 and subservience to others' good, breaks 
 out in a more exquisite and Christian form 
 in Milton's poem on his blindness. Hav- 
 ing heaped up the description of its dis- 
 tresses and privations, he turns, for his 
 rejoicing in it, to this thought, and this 
 only : — 
 
 " They also serve who only stand and wait." 
 And if they who stand and v/ait, do not 
 those who suffer too ? Is it conceivable 
 that God should give to some, whom He 
 blesses with health and vigor and large 
 gifts of influence, the privilege of greatly 
 serving Him, of doing a wide work of use 
 for others ; and that this privilege, which 
 none else can equal or supply. He with- 
 holds from others from whom He takes 
 health and strength, and every gift but 
 that of suffering .'' Does He give the one 
 the blessedness of serving, and refuse it to 
 the other } " Behold, my ways are egua/, 
 saith the Lord." 
 
 If our life were ordained to be good, 
 
90 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 truly, satisfy ingly good, it could be made 
 so only in one way. It must be a life of 
 sacrifice, for all other goods fall short — 
 we know they fall infinitely short — of 
 this ; and it must be sacrifice for unseen 
 ends, because the best ends must be un- 
 seen by us. To be the best, our life must 
 be sacrifice, and for ends unseen. It must 
 be, therefore, to us, just what our life is. 
 Must we not believe, then, that our life is 
 this : the best .-* 
 
 In its fruitless-seeming* pains and fail- 
 ures, it fulfils the conditions of being the 
 best life, of presenting the highest form of 
 good, and of being turned to the best ends. 
 It is this God calls upon us to believe ; 
 this is a demand He makes for faith, show- 
 ing us, to justify and confirm it, a life, like 
 our own, of sorrow and humiliation ; or if 
 in this unlike our own, unlike only because. 
 the sorrow was greater, and the humilia- 
 tion more profound ; a life of sorrow in 
 which the meaning and the end are no 
 more concealed, but made manifest to all. 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 9I 
 
 Revealing so the secret of our life, He 
 calls on us for faith. 
 
 And so the pain of life is made good — 
 all its pain ; not indeed to our sensuous 
 feeling, but to that deeper feeling which 
 rules and subordinates the other. This 
 faith has power to make pain good ; to 
 make us place above all price that which 
 we most should shrink from. Only let 
 the love be strong enough, and pain can- 
 not be too great, nor loss too absolute. 
 
 And therefore, feeling that the heart 
 here becomes the judge (the reason hav- 
 ing given its assent), appealing to the 
 heart, to that moral feeling on which the 
 existence of God Himself rests firm in 
 man's belief, have we not answer, distinct 
 and clear, that pain must be sacrifice ; a 
 privilege, and not a loss ? Does not the 
 thought, once seen to be possible, affirm 
 itself as necessary, and refuse to be held 
 in doubt ? Does it not link itself with the 
 belief in God, so that we are compelled to 
 say that if God is, then pain is sacrifice— 
 
92 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 sacrifice for man ? For if we think other- 
 wise, then do we not choose to join evil 
 with His name ? Not to believe our pains 
 serve others* good, and are the fact of 
 man's redemption, is but to disbelieve in 
 God. It is to doubt His goodness, and 
 contradict the very evidence on which we 
 assert His being. Once recognized in its 
 true meaning, the thought ceases to be a 
 question of argument and balanced evi- 
 dence ; it sinks into the soul, and becomes 
 part of that deep conviction on which all 
 religion rests. Pain cannot be interpreted 
 otherwise than thus, when once we see 
 that it can be thus interpreted. The heart 
 rises up from its chains and rejoices. God 
 has revealed Himself ; He has manifested 
 joy, and we see it and are glad. Amid our 
 tears we smile, for when our woes are 
 deepest, then our joys are highest. Then 
 we are likest Him, are nearest to the dig- 
 nity of manhood ; partakers most in that on 
 which all living joy is based, needing only 
 that our life be perfected to make it joy. 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 93 
 
 We seek to be delivered from pain and 
 sorrow, and God designs to deliver us. 
 Vainly we seek, but He accomplishes. 
 Our end is not mistaken, but we mistake 
 the means. We seek deliverance by tak- 
 ing away ; He gives deliverance by add- 
 ing:— 
 
 " 'Tis life of which our nerves are scant, 
 More life and fuller, that we want ; " 
 
 and God our Father, who knows our disease 
 and provides the remedy, leads us also to 
 see our need of it. 
 
 Surely it is not hard thus to turn and 
 keep our thoughts, recognizing our own 
 too narrow life, and our too contracted 
 heart therewith, that makes us seek a good 
 too small, and be too easily content ; that 
 gives us a content which cannot be undis- 
 turbed, desires which God cannot gratify, 
 because that would be to curse instead of 
 blessing ; to curse instead of blessing him 
 for whom He has ordained the highest 
 blessedness. Surely it is not hard to be 
 on our guard against ourselves, and to 
 
94 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 remember that our wanting and enfeebled 
 nature misleads us, makes us grasp at 
 remedies that are no remedies, at goods 
 that are too small and pitiful for human 
 good ; — not hard to aspire after more, and 
 feel that our only joy must be in that 
 which we already know as the highest and 
 the best. Surely we can learn to shape 
 our prayer for health, not for alleviations ; 
 for power to enjoy the good, not for the 
 false goods our sickness can enjoy ; for 
 power to rise up from man's false thought 
 to God's true. 
 
 When, as reward, the prospect of our 
 future grows into infinite glory, the 
 thought of human nature rises into an 
 elevation unconceived ; God appears before 
 us infinite afresh in tenderness; and the 
 darkness of human sorrow, all the sad 
 failure and agony of life, shining with the 
 brightness of Christ's own sacrifice, are 
 changed into the instruments and prophe- 
 cies of joy. 
 
 Surely it is not hard to think; — not, 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 9$ 
 
 I want self-good to make me happy ; but 
 I want life to make sacrifice my joy! 
 And thus there is no mystery in pain. 
 The world were an utter and hopeless 
 mystery if pain were not. Where, then, 
 would be the basis and the root of love, 
 the prophecy of an enlarged and an enno- 
 bled nature } where the revelation of our 
 life in Christ ? 
 
 But there are some difficulties that will 
 probably suggest themselves in respect to 
 this thought. Two of these especially 
 demand notice. 
 
 1. It may be felt that there can be no 
 satisfactory treatment of the question of 
 pain without a reference to sin. Is not 
 sin the radical cause of all other evil, and 
 without it would not man have had an 
 entire immunity from suffering ? 
 
 2. If we receive the thought that sacri- 
 fice is itself a good, and that painful things 
 truly are the best, will it not lead us to 
 voluntary choice and preference of pain 
 to pleasure } In a word, would it not 
 
90 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 re-establish the long-disproved theory of 
 asceticism ? 
 
 In reference to the first of these ques- 
 tions very few words are required. So 
 far from the connection of pain with sin 
 being called in question by the view that 
 has been given, it is emphatically asserted. 
 The whole thought consists in tracing out 
 how pain arises and must arise from sin. 
 From sin comes that diseased and wanting 
 state of man whereby alone pain can be 
 felt. Without sin pain had not been ; for 
 there had not been that perversion of feel- 
 ing, and lack of life, whereby sacrifice is 
 felt as pain. Pain is from sin, but sacri- 
 fice is not. The conditions of good and 
 of happiness are not altered by it. These 
 ever were to be found in sacrifice, and ever 
 must be. Therefore it is that where sin 
 has entered, and death by sin, pain must be. 
 
 And if it should be asked. How, then, 
 did Christ become subject to pain, seeing 
 that in Him was no sin } the answer is 
 found in the fact that Christ took our 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 97 
 
 infirmity; the disease of our nature was 
 laid on Him, that He might remove it. 
 He shared our feeling, that He might 
 reveal the Father to us. and deliver us 
 from the evil that He sharea 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 T3UT still this question remains : if the 
 ■^ good of human life is found in that 
 which we feel as painful, should we not 
 seek pain rather than pleasure ? Would 
 not the acceptance of this idea lead us to 
 the arbitrary choice of suffering, to the 
 wilful giving up of all that makes life joy- 
 ous, the abrogation of the sanctities of 
 home, the deliberate extinction of all that 
 civilizes ? 
 
 Though this question is naturally sug- 
 gested by the thoughts which precede, 
 nothing can be farther from their real 
 spirit. It is because the things in which 
 we find suffering are the sole condition of 
 a full and perfect happiness that they are 
 good. It is because life ought to be joyful 
 that we have claimed this place, as joy- 
 giver, for sorrow. 
 
 98 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 99 
 
 Pain is evil ; it marks, and is token, 
 of disease. It bespeaks want and loss. 
 Thinking thus, we do not seek pain ; we 
 do not seek even to be resigned to it : we 
 seek its utter destruction, the doing away 
 all possibility even of its presence. Our 
 hearts are avaricious, rather, of delight, 
 and refuse to be satisfied with anything 
 less than the utmost that we can receive. 
 
 For, evidently, it is an entirely different 
 thing to say. Sacrifice is the good ; and to 
 say, Pain is good. The association of pain 
 with sacrifice, as we have seen — nay, as 
 we know so well by experiences, happily, 
 we may believe, becoming more familiar in 
 human life — is unnecessary and partial, 
 not constant and inevitable. The true 
 affinities of sacrifice are with pleasure, 
 with rapture even. It is only by evil or 
 v/ant within, that sacrifice can be other- 
 wise than glad. 
 
 To dwell with joy, with deliberate 
 choice, on sacrifice, even to refuse to all 
 else the rightful name of good, is not to 
 
lOO THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 praise or to sanction pain, but to affirm 
 emphatically that it ought not to be ; nay, 
 that it ought not to be possible. That to 
 which it has attached itself, the very root 
 from which it seems to grow (though not, 
 in truth, does it grow from that root, but 
 from quite another, and it is a fatal error 
 which thus mistakes its source), should 
 yield the opposite. There should be no 
 pain to man : from him, as he should be, 
 sorrow and sighing should flee away — but 
 not by the taking away of sacrifice. 
 
 If there be any difficulty felt here, the 
 source of it will become quite manifest by 
 recalling the illustration of sickness. Let 
 us conceive, again, a sick man saying, 
 "Alas ! all motion of my limbs, all attempt 
 to take exercise, is an intolerable pain to 
 me ; I cannot endure it ; " and that the 
 reply was made to him, " Courage, my 
 dear friend ; do not let yourself think of 
 that as painful in itself, though it is exqui- 
 site and unendurable torture to you : that 
 is the secret of the strong man's pleasure, 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 10 1 
 
 and you shall come to have perfect and 
 now almost inconceivable delight in it. 
 Do not let yourself confuse the poor com- 
 fort, necessary as it may be to you, of 
 sinking on your bed and lying still, with 
 the true enjoyments of a man." Would 
 this reply be thought a praise and recom- 
 mendation of pain, or to advise the wilful 
 choice of it ? Surely not. It would simply 
 be to encourage the sick man, to keep his 
 standard of pleasure high enough, and not 
 to let it be degraded by his perverted 
 feeling. 
 
 It is, in this respect, precisely the same 
 thing when we rebuke ourselves for our 
 false thoughts, and urge upon ourselves to 
 recognize that, in the experience of suffer- 
 ing and loss which we feel even as unen- 
 durable distress, we must look for, and 
 shall find, the source of joy. 
 
 In another way the true relations of this 
 thought respecting pain may be illustrated. 
 Let it be assumed that our object is joy, 
 that this is the good at which we aim. 
 
I02 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 Now here is in our life this fact of sacri- 
 fice, of individual suffering, opposing and 
 preventing its perfect attainment ; hurting, 
 harming, often rendering joy impossible. 
 Whence and what is the remedy to be ^ 
 How is the hurtful thing to be rendered 
 harmless, the mischief to be neutralized.? 
 Our whole knowledge of nature and of 
 life concur in giving one answer : it m.ust 
 be turned to use. Things cease to hurt us 
 then, and then only permanently, when 
 they are made to serve our good. Nor can 
 it be otherwise ; for nothing can be anni- 
 hilated, nothing hindered from having, in 
 some form or other, its full effect. The 
 mere putting away or putting down evils 
 has never succeeded. They return with a 
 violence increased by the delay. The one 
 condition upon which we can really avoid 
 suffering by hurtful things is that we 
 should use them and make them serve us. 
 A striking instance — though it is but an 
 instance of a universal law — is given by 
 the problem with which every large body 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. IO3 
 
 of persons has to strive, of disposing of 
 the waste materials of their life. Hurtful 
 to a high degree, these waste materials are 
 the source of inevitable disease if they are 
 not put utterly away? But how thus 
 utterly put them away ? There is but one 
 method that is truly efficient, and that is 
 to make them subservient to the increase 
 of the means of life, to render them the 
 fertilizers of our lands, the source of food. 
 The drainage of towns will either poison or 
 be an enormous tax, or it will feed. The 
 condition of its ceasing to be an evil is 
 that it shall become a good. Necessarily 
 it is so : its effects cannot be made null ; 
 our only choice is, shall they work our 
 mischief or our benefit .-* 
 
 Now to point out that the noxious mate- 
 rials of our bodily life are in themselves a 
 source of good, is not to encourage men 
 to accept, or to deter them from removing, 
 their ill effects. It is to open the path 
 to their removal and to stimulate the 
 work. It substitutes for futile efforts at 
 
104 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 escape or suppression the rational plan of 
 use. 
 
 It is such a change as this that would 
 ensue in our practical life from the accep- 
 tance of the thought that sacrifice is the 
 source of joy, and that it is associated 
 with pain to us only by the want that is in 
 ourselves. It would never prompt us to 
 seek pain, never lead us to choose it for 
 its own sake, never lead us to undervalue 
 joy. It would make enjoyment more 
 sacred in our eyes, w^ould raise it to a holy 
 significance, making it teach us lessons 
 beyond itself. It is an image — feeble, 
 partial, and too small though it be — of 
 that which should be, in its perfection, 
 universal in our life. It carries on our 
 thoughts to a higher joy that should be 
 never absent, being fullest in those por- 
 tions of our life whence all joy now is 
 banished. 
 
 But further, this view not only guards 
 us from the arbitrary choice of pain, it 
 enables us to trace how that abuse arose, 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN, IO5 
 
 and whence sprang that ascetic and self- 
 denying spirit, which, while not without 
 its grandeur, has inflicted so many injuries 
 on men. Mankind have always recognized 
 a goodness in things that are painful. In 
 no time or place has the feeling been 
 wholly absent ; but they have not always 
 understood the reason. It was not recog- 
 nized that these things are good only 
 because they are sacrifice, and subserve 
 others' welfare, and are therefore the true 
 source of gladness ; that they are good in 
 a familiar and human sense, because they 
 are adapted to give joy. Hence men 
 unavoidably mistook, and attributed the 
 goodness they could not but recognize in 
 them to that which is emphatically not 
 good — to that which is the sign of our own 
 evil — the pain that was connected with 
 them. They ascribed to pain the good- 
 ness which belongs to sacrifice as the 
 giver, above all other things, of joy. A 
 strange and yet an inevitable inversion of 
 thought, while the affections had not as 
 
I06 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 yet fully recognized the joy that is in sac- 
 rifice, nor faith apprehended the relation 
 of all human life to the unseen work that 
 God does in man. 
 
 It was thus asceticism arose, seeking 
 pain as good, self-denial as an end ; and 
 thus it failed. But the lesson it teaches 
 remains for us. There is good in that 
 which we find painful : the human soul 
 does and will recognize it ; nor can luxury 
 nor scorn nor the history of innumerable 
 ills wrought by pursuing pain, prevent. 
 Man's soul recurs to it, in spite of experi- 
 ence, in spite of enlightenment, in spite of 
 ease. 
 
 Surely one thing alone can cure asceti- 
 cism of its error and free mankind from 
 its dangers ; and that is to recognize the 
 true nature of the good that is in sacrifice; 
 that it is good, not for itself, nor because 
 it involves pain, but precisely because it 
 is not for itself, and is the true root of 
 pleasure. If this be recognized, asceti- 
 cism cannot again arise to distort life and 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. lO/ 
 
 tax humanity beyond its powers ; the ele- 
 ments of our nature in which it has its 
 root are turned into another channel, and 
 find their satisfaction in deeds animated 
 by another spirit. 
 
 A perfect guide, indeed, is given us 
 thus in respect to the acts of sacrifice 
 we should or should not undertake. Only 
 that painful thing is good which has in it 
 the root of pleasure. And this is that 
 alone which serves others' good. There- 
 fore no arbitrary, self-chosen sacrifice is 
 good; there is no source of joy in that; 
 it fails of the first condition. Only that 
 sacrifice is good which either we accept 
 for another's sake, ourselves seeing and 
 choosing the result ; or that which serves 
 a like end unseen by us : and surely better 
 serves a better end, being in God's hands, 
 and not ours. For seen or unseen service 
 sacrifice is good, but only when it is for 
 service. 
 
 And this service either we accomplish 
 for ourselves, or God works for us. We 
 
IC8 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 accomplish it when we consciously act 
 from love or duty, and are blest in wit- 
 nessing the service rendered. But God 
 works it for us when He inflicts on us 
 pains or losses ; that is, when necessity 
 enforces them, or right commands. In 
 these He is our minister, our Steward, to 
 bestow better than we could do the ser- 
 vice of our love. In sacrifices that we 
 cannot escape, that come from Providence 
 or deeds of men who in this are God's 
 instruments, and in sacrifices for which 
 He calls in duty, we recognize His hand, 
 and know that they are used by Him. 
 We feel our hearts glowing with a delight 
 that humility does not forbid, " in this the 
 Lord hath need of us." So far, He uses 
 and blesses us, undertaking Himself to be 
 the dispenser of our gifts. 
 
 The best in life, then, reading it by 
 faith, as seeing the invisible (which not 
 to do is blindness and self-chosen error), 
 the best in life is that part of it wherein 
 there is inflicted on us, or rather accepted 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. IO9 
 
 from US, inevitable sacrifice ; it is in losses 
 that we cannot escape, pains that God 
 calls on us to bear, bafflings from which 
 no effort can set us free, no uprightness 
 deliver ; or in that part of it wherein the 
 voice of duty bids us incur loss or pain, 
 or leave unacted the deeds that would 
 delight us most. These things are the 
 best in life ; for these are God using us, 
 these are His taking our poor services — 
 poor at the best, though they may be 
 great to us — and Himself using them 
 in ways too good, too deep and wide for 
 us to see. These are our contribution to 
 the redemption of the world, felt as pain- 
 ful because the sources of a joy too great, 
 which we make our own by freely yield- 
 ing, and accepting them ; thus making- 
 God's deed ours. Must not this be the 
 best in life, the highest privilege } We 
 link our weakness with omnipotence ; our 
 blindness with omniscience. This is the 
 privilege of the destitute, the sick, the 
 feeble, of those who are thwarted and cast 
 
no THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 down, who cannot save themselves. Be- 
 hold, to them too it is given to save 
 others. 
 
 Next to this privilege in goodness, 
 among the things that life can offer us, 
 come the sacrifices we can bear willingly 
 for the good of others ; less good, indeed, 
 but seeming more to us, a good that we 
 can see, and consciously subserve. 
 
 These are the portions of our life that 
 rise to the level of true goodness. Each 
 yields us joy in proportion to our love; 
 the greatest privilege demanding for its 
 joy, even because it is the greatest, faith 
 as well as love. 
 
 Besides these, and separated from them 
 by an immeasurable interval, there are 
 the pleasures which are not of sacrifice, 
 the pleasures of mere enjoyment : not 
 truly good, yet not without their value. 
 These are the portions of our life that can- 
 not be employed for their best use ; that 
 our disability compels us to leave un- 
 turned to their true account ; the allevia- 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. Ill 
 
 tions which our sickness needs, and must 
 bow itself to accept. 
 
 There are then, in this respect, three 
 elements in our life : — First, the perfect 
 good, which comes to us in the form of 
 providential and inevitable sacrifice, or 
 loss that right demands, on the full glad- 
 ness of which we enter by faith, knowing 
 in our hearts that we cannot see. Next, 
 there is the good, less, but still great 
 and worthy of our manhood, the serving 
 others consciously, and of our own free 
 will, for ends within our sight, the joy of 
 which is in proportion to our love. In 
 this is included all honest and unselfish 
 work. And lastly, there are the pleasures 
 we can gain for ourselves, the satisfactions 
 of an individual kind with which our life 
 is so abundantly surrounded. These last 
 mark our feebleness and want; but they 
 are needful for us, and our enjoyment of 
 them is essential. In so far as they give 
 joy, they are types and reflections of the 
 perfect life, though in a negative and in- 
 
112 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 verse form. We understand their nature 
 if we look on them as like the reliefs 
 and perverted pleasures which the sick 
 man demands ; not good, but to us neces- 
 sary, and by us felt as good. This 
 necessity and this feeling mark our dis- 
 ability, our need of a restored and perfect 
 life. 
 
 And thus we see, from another point of 
 view, the error of asceticism. The at- 
 tempt to render man independent of self- 
 enjoyment is an ignoring of his disease ; 
 it is an attempt to act as if in health while 
 health is wanting to us. It is not only 
 our right, it is our duty to enjoy and to be 
 happy. This is evident on all grounds. 
 It is fitting to our state, and it is practi- 
 cally right. Pleasure does us good if 
 gratefully and lovingly accepted ; the na- 
 ture often expands and blossoms under it 
 as under no other influence. And suffer- 
 ing, oftentimes, not felt as the spring of 
 joy it is, sours, cramps, and hardens. We 
 cannot dispense with joy ; we were never 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. II3 
 
 meant to dispense with it ; but we should 
 seek it rightly. 
 
 Neither is there any tendency in the 
 thought of sacrifice as the true source of 
 joy to diminish the pleasurableness of 
 that which we may call self-pleasure, or in 
 any way to mar our natural enjoyments. 
 It may, indeed, throw them into the shade, 
 and relax somewhat (would to God it 
 might !) the passion of our grasp upon 
 them and pursuit after them ; but this is 
 only by bringing them into the presence 
 of another and superior pleasure. It is 
 but as the boy less values childish sports 
 as he grows into an appreciation of the 
 serious gratifications of maturity, and sees 
 that they have served their purpose in 
 awakening capacities and calling forth 
 desires they were never meant to fill. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 'T^WO things might be here attempted : 
 -^ on the one hand, to trace farther the 
 bearing of these thoughts upon our cus- 
 tomary views ; and on the other, to show- 
 how they might influence our life. But 
 it seems better to leave them now un- 
 touched. These few pages have been 
 written rather for some than for all, for 
 those whom a special discipline may have 
 prepared to welcome them ; and to these I 
 commit the thought, painfully conscious of 
 my inability to say it as it should be said, 
 an inability which those to whom I have 
 written will at once feel most deeply, and 
 most willingly forgive. To them I may 
 say — for they whose tongues have often 
 faltered and been dumb from very eager- 
 ness of passion, and dread lest any words, 
 even the best, should spoil their story, will 
 
 114 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. II5 
 
 understand me — that great desire and 
 fear have hindered me. These words I 
 have stammered through ; let them read, 
 . in their feebleness, reverence ; a tribute 
 to the sacredness of grief, made more 
 sacred by the glory of its consolation. 
 
 I do not seek to show whether, or in 
 what way, other thoughts, natural and 
 perhaps established thoughts, might need 
 to be modified in order not to conflict 
 with these. There would probably be 
 much less demand for change than might 
 be supposed by those to whom the preced- 
 ing thoughts may seem new. It may, 
 however, serve to guard against mistake, 
 if I say that of course no meritorious char- 
 acter is ascribed to human sufferings. 
 Man's redemption is accomplished in 
 them ; not in any way by virtue of them ; 
 the restoration of humanity is carried out 
 in our experience, not wrought by us. I 
 need scarcely say that, because in these 
 pages man's condition has been compared 
 to that of disease, it is not to be supposed 
 
Il6 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 that other aspects of his state are not 
 recognized, especially his sinfulness ; or 
 that Christ's work in relation to sin is 
 lightly valued. But there has been the 
 less reason for reference to these things, 
 because I have left untouched the question 
 of sin, and designedly limited myself to a 
 smaller problem. Hereafter, light may 
 perhaps be thrown even upon that pro- 
 foundest of all mysteries, man's revolt 
 from God and deliberate choice of evil. I 
 may perhaps be pardoned for thinking 
 that to understand pain aright may tend 
 to lessen, rather than to aggravate, the 
 difficulty of the greater mystery of sin. 
 
 It may seem to some that more mention 
 should be made of pains that arise from 
 sympathy, and so have their source in love. 
 Let me say that, as these are among the 
 acutest of human sufferings, an emphatic 
 reference has been made to them in that 
 which has preceded. Love can transform 
 them, though it gives them birth. While 
 any loved ones sorrow and are in distress, 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. II7 
 
 sympathy with them must be sorrowful 
 too ; but if ^//sacrifice is made joyful, then 
 sympathy with others' sacrifice will be 
 sympathy with their joy. These sorrows, 
 also, man's perfect life will turn into re- 
 joicing. 
 
 In so far as these thoughts respecting 
 pain depend on a recognition of unseen 
 ends served by it, it seems to me that the 
 recent tendency of the human mind is 
 wonderfully, and surely most happily, in 
 harmony with them. What better could 
 the students of Nature and the students of 
 Humanity agree in telling us than this — 
 their great lesson in these modern days — 
 that the true essence and meaning of all 
 things is hidden from our natural sight ? 
 What is this but to echo back the words 
 we have so familiarly heard from childhood 
 upward, till they have perhaps partly lost 
 their force, which bid us live as seeing the 
 invisible, and walk, not by sight but by 
 faith .? If this is the last lesson of science, 
 it is also the first lesson of religion ; per- 
 
Il8 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 haps now better to be learnt than ever 
 before, and better understood, because 
 reiterated from this new region, and en- 
 forced by this new evidence. To under- 
 stand or feel our life aright, we must 
 regard something not visible to ourselves : 
 we must, in fact, be using faith. This, 
 science tells us ; this, philosophy. Shall 
 they tell it to us in vain — to us who need 
 so deeply to believe and act upon it, whose 
 whole life is shrouded in darkness if it be 
 not true, and may be, nay, must be, radiant 
 with an unutterable glory and delight if it 
 be true } Shall we refuse God's gifts be- 
 cause they come to us from unexpected 
 quarters .'' shall we refuse to listen to this 
 confirmation of the gladdest message, be- 
 cause it is given in unfamiliar tones ^ 
 
 And in respect to the practical bear- 
 ing of these thoughts respecting pain, 
 I refrain from speaking, partly because I 
 feel incompetent, but more because I feel 
 that it is not necessary. That they must 
 have practical influence where they are 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 1 19 
 
 truly felt, surely is evident : what influ- 
 ence they should have, perhaps, is better 
 left to each person's heart than stated in 
 another's words. If the thought can sink 
 and take root in the soul, it will bear fruit, 
 better fruit spontaneously than if con- 
 formed to any pattern. Nor, indeed, are 
 circumstances so much alike in different 
 cases that external actions can be con- 
 formed to special rules. This seems 
 enough : a beautiful external life is the 
 fruit of life within, especially of that life 
 which dwells in joy. If joy could be 
 brought to sorrow-stricken hearts, their 
 path would blossom with good deeds ; the 
 gladness within would overflow in acts of 
 heroism and devotion, not uncalled for 
 even yet. 
 
 And does not joy grow out of sorrow 
 when we see it thus — an infinite and 
 tender joy passing all other? Do we not 
 feel the very throbbings of God's heart, 
 and see even this sad world beautiful and 
 good beyond conception, beyond hope; 
 
I20 THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 
 
 the poor, the miserable, the blighted and 
 shipwrecked lives clothed with a sublimity 
 grand, and yet exquisitely tender, that 
 pales before it the best joys of earth, fair 
 and blessed though they be ? It is good 
 to be blest in health, and strength, and 
 family, and friends, and prospects, and 
 success ; in capacity, and power, and scope 
 for usefulness ; in love returned, and grow- 
 ing with its return, giving and receiving 
 more with every year ; in deeds of wide 
 beneficence which enrich the lives of 
 nations. It is good to be blest so ; but 
 not so good as to be sacrificed, poor and 
 wretched, halt and maimed and bruised, 
 heart-broken, spiritless, incapable, lost 
 utterly — so sacrificed for man's redemp- 
 tion. That is to be like Christ ; it is to 
 hear Him say, ** Thou drinkest of my cup ; 
 with my baptism art baptized. I make 
 thee one with me, the destined sharer of 
 my joy." 
 
 It is not too much ; no, it is not too 
 much ; but it is more than can be given, 
 
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 121 
 
 save in utterest abasement. The head on 
 which this bliss is poured must be bowed 
 into the dust. 
 
 We cry in our agony, in weakness, fail- 
 ure, perplexity of heart, that there is no 
 hope nor help. No hand seems to direct 
 the storm, no pity listens. " God has for- 
 saken us," we say. Do we say so, and not 
 recall the words which fell in that great 
 victory on Calvary — fell from the Con- 
 queror's lips, " My God, my God, why hast 
 thou forsaken me } " Blackness of dark- 
 ness and despair, and sorrow blotting out 
 God's hand, and feebleness sinking without 
 a stay, — these are not failure. In these 
 characters was written first the charter of 
 our deliverance ; these are the characters 
 in which it is renewed. 
 
May 1 < 
 
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COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
 
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