hiefly in the importance attached to different qualities.

What seems to be useless self-sacrifice and unnecessary suffering is as
much as possible avoided. The strain of sentiment which valued suffering
in itself as an expiatory thing, as a mode of following the Man of
Sorrows, as a thing to be for its own sake embraced and dwelt upon, and
prolonged, bears a very great part in some of the most beautiful
Christian lives, and especially in those which were formed under the
influence of the Catholic Church. An old legend tells how Christ once
appeared as a Man of Sorrows to a Catholic Saint, and asked him what
boon he would most desire. 'Lord,' was the reply, 'that I might suffer
most.' This strain runs deeply through the whole ascetic literature and
the whole monastic system of Catholicism, and outside Catholicism it has
been sometimes shown by a reluctance to accept the aid of anaesthetics,
which partially or wholly removed suffering supposed to have been sent
by Providence. The history of the use of chloroform furnishes striking
illustrations of this. Many of my readers may remember the French monks
who devoted themselves to cultivating one of the most pestilential spots
in the Roman Campagna, which was associated with an ecclesiastical
legend, and who quite unnecessarily insisted on remaining there during
the season when such a residence meant little less than a slow suicide.
They had, as they were accustomed to say, their purgatory upon earth,
and they remained till their constitutions were hopelessly shattered and
they were sent to die in their own land. Touching examples might be
found in modern times of men who, in the last extremes of disease or
suffering, scrupled, through religious motives, about availing
themselves of the simplest alleviations,[21] and something of the same
feeling is shown in the desire to prolong to the last possible moment
hopeless and agonising disease. All this is manifestly and rapidly
disappearing. To endure with patience and resignation inevitable
suffering; to encounter courageously dangers and suffering for some
worthy and useful end, ranks, indeed, as high as it ever did in the
ethics of the century, but suffering for its own sake is no longer
valued, and it is deemed one of the first objects of a wise life to
restrict and diminish it.

No one, I think, has seen more clearly or described more vividly than
Goethe the direction in which in modern times the current of morals is
flowin