ation covers the
suffering of all sub-human life.

+The true extent of the problem of pain.+--But the problem is not so
large as it looks. When we hear of a terrible event like the Jamaica
disaster, we are apt to jump to the conclusion that the amount of
suffering in the world is specially and enormously greater because of
it. But that is not so. Our standard of measurement is a false one.
The amount of pain endured depends upon the consciousness enduring it
and upon its capacity for looking before and after. Besides we only
suffer individually, and therefore all the pain of the world is
comprised within the experience of the being who suffers most, whoever
that may be. We ought to estimate the actual amount of cosmic
suffering by the intensity of the suffering borne by any one individual
at any one time. We are not immediately conscious of all the woe of
the universe; we are each of us conscious of our own, even though it
may be caused by sympathy with others; and the world's woe taken as a
whole is not greater than the amount borne by him whose consciousness
of it is greatest. This is what we may call the intensive as
contrasted with the extensive observation of the problem of pain. It
is a kind of barometrical measurement. We do not gauge the weather by
adding together the figures of all the storm-glasses in the world; the
rise or fall of the mercury in any one of them, especially the best one
among them, comprehends the whole. Here is the problem of pain in a
nutshell. The whole appalling tale of cosmic suffering can be
compressed within the limits of the individual consciousness which has
endured the most.

+The purpose of pain.+--Nor is there the slightest need to be afraid of
it. Theologians may tell us that we should never have known anything
about it but for man's first disobedience, and humanists may maintain
that it is impossible to reconcile it with belief in the goodness of
God; but they are both wrong. There are some things impossible even to
omnipotence, and one of them is the realisation of a love which has
never known pain. If creation is the self-expression of God, pain was
inevitable from the first. For what is the nature of God? According
to the Christian religion it is love. And what is love? Here is
another slippery word which has had some contradictory connotations in
the course of its history. Some time ago Mr. G. Bernard Shaw delivered
a lecture at the City Temple on the "Re