o one who knows anything of the world and of
life can pretend to think or say that suffering always results from, or
is at all proportioned to, moral faults; and if we are tempted to
regard all our disasters as penal consequences, then we are tempted to
endure them with gloomy and morbid immobility.

It is far more wholesome and encouraging to look upon many disasters
that befall us as opportunities to show a little spirit, to evoke the
courage which does not come by indolent prosperity, to increase our
sympathy, to enlarge our experience, to make things clearer to us, to
develop our mind and heart, to free us from material temptations. Past
suffering is not always an evil, it is often an exciting reminiscence.
It is good to take life adventurously, like Odysseus of old. What would
one feel about Odysseus if, instead of contriving a way out of the
Cyclops' cave, he had set himself to consider of what forgotten sin his
danger was the consequence? Suffering and disaster come to us to
develop our inventiveness and our courage, not to daunt and dismay us;
and we ought therefore to approach experience with a sense of humour,
if possible, and with a lively curiosity. I recollect hearing a man the
other day describing an operation to which he had been subjected. "My
word," he said, his eyes sparkling with delight at the recollection,
"that was awful, when I came into the operating-room, and saw the
surgeons in their togs, and the pails and basins all about, and was
invited to step up to the table!" There is nothing so agreeable as the
remembrance of fears through which we have passed; and we can only
learn to despise them by finding out how unbalanced they were.

I do not mean that fears can ever be pleasant at the time, but we do
them too much honour if we court them and defer to them. However much
we may be tortured by them, there is always something at the back of
our mind which despises our own susceptibility to them; and it is that
deeper instinct which we ought to trust.

But we cannot even begin to trust it, as long as we allow ourselves to
believe pietistically that the Mind of God is set on punishment. That
is the ghastly error which humanity tends to make. It has been dinned
into us, alas, from our early years, and religious phraseology is
constantly polluted by it. Our Saviour lent no countenance to this at
all; He spoke perfectly plainly against the theory of "judgments." Of
course suffering is sometimes a conseq