ABSTRACT
THE problem of suffering is one of those ever-recurring riddles whose answer, hidden from the wise and prudent, is often revealed unto babes. Why suffering, indeed, should ever be allowed in God’s fair world, no human ingenuity has been able to explain. But the fact remains that when suffering takes the form which we were considering in the last chapter, suffering and salvation become synonymous. No face is more beautiful than the face that has been marked by the lines of grief; grief born of no personal weakness or self-indulgence or sin, or of its sad fruit, remorse; but the grief that accompanies the entering in to the sin of others; and such an entering in, to the sensitive soul, must be more bitter than the knowledge of self-committed sin. This grief has no admixture of selfishness, and it is selfishness which is the sting of purely human grief; freed from selfishness, grief grows akin to the “divine compassion,” which links man most closely to God. Such suffering presents no difficulty to the mind. It is not a curse, but a blessing. In every age, human nature would have been infinitely the poorer had no tears been shed for the frequent sinning and the unmanly repentances of those whose own hearts had never known the pangs of honest self-condemnation.
