every new ascent fresh trouble, as they think, awaiting
them, whereas in truth they have brought the trouble with them. Others,
making haste to be rich, are slow to find out that the poverty of their
souls, none the less that their purses are filling, will yet keep them
unhappy. Some court endless change, nor know that on themselves the
change must pass that will set them free. Others expand their souls with
knowledge, only to find that content will not dwell in the great house
they have built. To number the varieties of human endeavour to escape
discomfort would be to enumerate all the modes of such life as does not
know how to live. All seek the thing whose defect appears the _cause_ of
their misery, and is but the variable _occasion_ of it, the cause of the
shape it takes, not of the misery itself; for, when one apparent cause
is removed, another at once succeeds. The real cause of his trouble is a
something the man has not perhaps recognized as even existent; in any
case he is not yet acquainted with its true nature.

However absurd the statement may appear to one who has not yet
discovered the fact for himself, the cause of every man's discomfort is
evil, moral evil--first of all, evil in himself, his own sin, his own
wrongness, his own unrightness; and then, evil in those he loves: with
this latter I have not now to deal; the only way to get rid of it, is
for the man to get rid of his own sin. No special sin may be
recognizable as having caused this or that special physical
discomfort--which may indeed have originated with some ancestor; but
evil in ourselves is the cause of its continuance, the source of its
necessity, and the preventive of that patience which would soon take
from it, or at least blunt its sting. The evil is _essentially_
unnecessary, and passes with the attainment of the object for which it
is permitted--namely, the development of pure will in man; the suffering
also is essentially unnecessary, but while the evil lasts, the
suffering, whether consequent or merely concomitant, is absolutely
necessary. Foolish is the man, and there are many such men, who would
rid himself or his fellows of discomfort by setting the world right, by
waging war on the evils around him, while he neglects that integral part
of the world where lies his business, his first business--namely, his
own character and conduct. Were it possible--an absurd supposition--that
the world should thus be righted from the outside, it wo