greeable things, and render men for a while oblivious of the
mystery and weight of an unintelligible world.

Nevertheless suffering is a stern fact that will not long permit us to
sleep. Some have taught the unreality of pain, but the logic of life
has spoiled their plausible philosophizing. A man may carry many
hallucinations with him to the grave, but a belief in the unreality of
pain is hardly likely to be one of them. The laughing philosopher is
quite invincible on his midsummer's day, but ere long fatality makes
him sad. There is no screen to shut off permanently the spectacle of
suffering. When Marie Antoinette passed to her bridal in Paris, the
halt, the lame, and the blind were sedulously kept out of her way,
lest their appearance should mar the joyousness of her reception; but,
ere long, the poor queen had a very close view of misery's children,
and she drank to the dregs the cup of life's bitterness. Reason as we
may, suppress the disagreeable truths of life as we may, suffering
will find us out, and pierce us to the heart. Indeed, despite our
dissimulations, we know that life is not a matter of lutes, doves, and
sunflowers, and at last we have little patience with those who thus
seek to represent it. We will not have the philosophy which ignores
suffering; witness the popularity of Schopenhauer. We resent the art
which ignores sorrow. True art has no pleasure in sin and suffering,
in torture, horror, and death; but on its palette must lie the sober
colorings of human life, and so to-day the most popular picture of the
world is the "Angelus" of Millet. We will not have the literature that
ignores suffering. "Humanity will look upon nothing else but its old
sufferings. It loves to see and touch its wounds, even at the risk of
reopening them. We are not satisfied with poetry unless we find tears
in it." We will not have the theology which ignores sin and suffering.
The preacher who confines his discourses to pleasant themes has a
meager following; the people swiftly and logically conclude that if
life is as flowery as the discourse, the preacher is superfluous.
Foolish we may often be, yet we cannot accept this Gethsemane for a
garden of the gods; the most wilful lotus-eater must perforce see the
streaming tears, the stain of blood, the shadow of death. Nature in
the full swing of her pageantry soon forgets the wild shriek of the
bird in the red talons of the hawk, and all other sad and tragic
things, but humani