nal and noxious men are prosperous and exempt from
pain, many of the gentlest and best are broken and tortured by constant
suffering? Why is it that inexplicable suffering seems so often to fall
on the wrong people, on the innocent not on the guilty, on those who
already are of refined and chastened disposition, not on those who seem
urgently to need correction and the rod? Is suffering sent that
character may be improved? But in Job's case it was sent because he was
already irreproachable, not to make him so. Is it sent because of a
man's early transgressions? But this man was _born_ blind; his
punishment preceded any possible transgression of his own. Was he then
the victim of his parent's wrong-doing? But suffering is often the
result of accident or of malice, or of mistake, which cannot be referred
to hereditary sin. Are we then to accept the belief that this world is
far from perfect as yet; that God begins at the beginning in all His
works, and only slowly works towards perfection, and that in the
progress, and while we are only moving towards an eternal state, there
must be pains manifold and bitter? They are the shavings and sawdust and
general disorder of the carpenter's workshop, which are necessarily
thrown off in the making of the needful article.[34] It is to it, to the
finished work, we must look, and not to the shavings, if we would
understand and be reconciled to the actual state of things around us.

When Jesus said, "Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents, but
that the works of God should be made manifest in him," He of course did
not mean to suggest that there is no such thing as suffering for
individual or hereditary sin. By breaking the great moral laws of human
life men constantly involve both themselves and their children in
lifelong suffering. There is often so direct a connection between sin
and suffering that the most hardened and insensible do not dream of
denying that their pain and misery are self-inflicted. Sometimes the
connection is obscure, and though every one else sees the source of a
man's misfortunes in his own careless habits, or indolence, or bad
temper, he himself may constantly blame his circumstances, his
ill-luck, his partners, or his friends. It was our Lord's intention to
warn the disciples against a curious and uncharitable scrutiny of any
man's life to find the cause of his misfortunes. We have to do rather
with the future than with the past, rather with the question