Are we offended at the cruelties of society ? St. Paul knows them fully. " Filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, covet- ousness, maliciousness, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity, whisperers, back-biters, hateful to God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenant breakers, without natural affec-
ROMANS VIII. i8 7
tion, unmerciful." Are we perplexed because Christ has added to the world's pain, and in the name of His Cross blood has been shed in torrents ? " If we suffer with him." Do we suppose that the physical agony of the brute creation is a modern discovery ? " We know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now." As it has been said, " Here we have, as nowhere else in the Bible, perhaps nowhere else in ancient literature, a man who feels the pain of creation." And this man, one of the world's greatest intellects, who knew the whole world's anguish, nevertheless declares throughout the whole Epistle that God is love. It is something at least to know that he knew all the facts.
^ Overmastering pain — the most deadly and tragical element in life — alas ! pain has its own way with all of us ; it breaks in, a rude visitant, upon the fairy garden where the child wanders in a dream, no less surely than it rules upon the field of battle, or sends the immortal war-god whimpering to his father; and innocence, no more than philosophy, can protect us from this sting.^
1. St. Paul had abundant personal experience of suffering. He was a Jew outside the pale of Jews. He was a pariah among pariahs. The very Jew3 would not associate with him. He was " hated of all men for Christ's name's sake." And, if in all the ranks of this hated subdivision of a sect there was one man who could be sensible of the scorn which was poured upon him, that man was the writer of these words. Born of the very bluest blood of Judaism — a Jew among Jews — educated as a conservative and a high churchman, with that bitter scorn of dissenters from his faith which then as now was the special mark of orthodox high breeding, he had come to be a dissenter among dissenters ; not only a Christian but an advocate of opinions which among Christians themselves were unpopular and proscribed. " I think that God hath set forth us the apostles last, as it were appointed to death: for we are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men. . . . We are made as the filth of the world, and are the offscouring of all things unto this day." And there was not only moral but also physical torture. Wherever the ecclesi- astical courts of his countrymen had jurisdiction, he received the " stripes " of a heretic. Wherever the civil courts of the Eoman
' B. L. Stevenson, Child's Play.
8 ANOTHER GOOD RECKONING
government took cognizance of him, he was " beaten " with the lictor's " rods " as a disturber of the peace. There was death in front ; there was ignominy and torture on either hand ; there was that terrible mingling of moral humiliation with physical pain which to a sensitive nature like St. Paul's is a thousand times worse than the agony of dying.^
2. In all times men have been born to sorrow. The history of our race is a history of pain. Nor is it certain that, as history has gone on, the pain has lessened. We hear from time to time of the alleviations of suffering which have marked the advance of civilization. We live in an age in which the effort to alleviate suffering forms a distinct feature in the organization of society. We cannot look at the photograph of contemporary life which is contained in a daily newspaper without seeing that benevolent institutions and social improvements occupy a large place in the thoughts and efforts of civilized mankind. But, for all that, the doubt remains whether the sum total of human misery has not increased. It would almost seem as though the onward march of civilization slays its thousands and maims its ten thousands. It is almost inevitable that it should be so. The whole machinery of society is so constructed as to make the difference between rich and poor wider as civilization increases. Wealth tends to accumulate in fewer hands. There is consequently not only a multiplication of the number of the poor, but a deepening of their poverty. The fact is so serious, and is becoming so prominent, that many of those who contemplate social phenomena from a scientific point of view regard it with undisguised alarm. Nor is its significance lessened by the fact that the newest of all philosophies is a philosophy of pessimism, a philosophy which is based on the conviction that we are going from bad to worse.
3. But we must not exaggerate the amount of suffering in the world. We cannot be blind to its existence ; it meets us in every direction, and it seems startling to be told by science that it is inseparably bound up in the existence of the lowest forms of life. Yet this is one of those vivid statements that seem to mean much more than they really do. If it means that some portion of pain is the lot of every living thing, that is quite true.