Two leading ideas emerge from this text : — I. Suffering as a Means to Perfection. II. The Necessity for the Sufferings of Christ.
I.
The Discipline of Sufferinq.
"Perfect through sufferings."
*' Perfect through sufferings " — we have grown accustomed to the phrase, but to any one who heard it for the first time, how
HEBREWS II. TO 305
strange it would sound ! " Perfect through sufferings ! " he would exclaim. Surely the writer must have made a mistake. He should have said perfect through joy. Suffering must be a sign and a cause of imperfection. Now, it is quite true that suffering is always a sign of present imperfection. But it may be the cause of future perfection, which could not be attained without it. On the assumption that the ultimate end of our existence is the development of a noble character, the necessity of suffering may be proved. For it can be shown that such a character could never be produced apart from the instrumentality of pain.
1. Suffering acts as a check upon our evil tendencies. Of course one may say that sin could have been prevented, and man saved from suffering. Yes, you can make a man of clay that cannot feel ; you can forge a steel man that an avalanche cannot hurt. But when you have done, your men are only physical — not moral, not spiritual. They have no vohtion, no power of choice, no moral nature, no spiritual aspirations, and no functions that are fitting them for an eternal life of love. True, they have no capacity for joy either ; and they are devoid of those higher attributes of sympathy and love that make God a Father and a Friend. Even so, if man had been intended to be only a physical being — a mere body, a machine di-iven by the resistless mandate of an overpowering will, God would doubtless have made him as hard and as unfeeling as the granite rock But God's purpose was to make a man — a being who by choice and will and struggle should remake himself, and become as like his Maker in the whole round of his higher nature as it is possible for him to be. And this purpose, manifest in creation, and reaffirmed in re- demption, alone explains the processes of life through which He is conducting us, and it teaches us that every trial and every pane of suffering, if regarded aright, may bear us ever nearer to God. Evil, then, being a necessary fact, some suffering is also a necessity. It is the desire for present enjoyment that leads men astray ; and they can be brought back only by the counteractive influence of pain. So far as suffering fulfils this purpose, it is manifestly the outcome of love.
^ God has His sanitary regulations as well as man. There are Divine cleansing forces at work, both in the material and in
I THESS.-HEB. — 20
J
06 PERFECT THROUGH SUFFERINGS
the moral world. And just as the tempest scatters the diseases that have gathered themselves together for deadly work, rendering them harmless, so the sufferings that follow guilt, and the revolu- tions of pain that overthrow the tyranny of an evil nature, are methods for securing the moral health of the race, and act as preservatives of man's spiritual life. You have doubtless seen specimens of our English weaving machines. Those machines are so constructed and arranged as to let the machinist know when anything is wrong, and to call his attention to the fault in the piece that he is weaving, so that he may correct it before the whole fabric is spoiled. Constructed on a somewhat similar principle is God's mechanism of human nature. You put your hand into the fire and you suffer; the pain makes you draw your hand out of the flame, and thus saves the limb from being burnt off without your knowing it. Your course of conduct is injuring your moral life, and your aching head and palpitating heart tell you so. Surely, then, there is wisdom as well as love manifest in the law that makes our physical sufferings teach us our moral dangers, and thus save us from them.^
(1) Suffering often acts as an intellectual and spiritual stimu- lus. The world's greater teachers have usually been men of sorrow.
^ When Dumas asked Eeboul, " What made you a poet ? " the answer was " Suffering." " If I had not been so great an invalid," said Darwin to a friend, " I should not have done nearly so much work." We do not know much about Shakespeare's life ; but we do know, from his sonnets, that he had suffered vastly. His heart had been wrung till it almost broke. And in Tennyson we have another striking illustration of the educa- tive effects of suffering. In Memoriam is by far his greatest poem; there are single stanzas in it worth almost all the rest of his works put together; and this poem was inspired by a great grief — the death of his friend Arthur Hallam.
(2) Suffering is necessary for the development in us of pity, mercy, and the spirit of self-sacrifice — the noblest of all our endowments. Only those who have experienced calamity them- selves can understand what it means. And unless we know what it is, we cannot sympathize with it ; nor are we likely to make any efforts towards averting it. No character can be perfect which has not acquired the capacity for pity ; for in the acquisition of this capacity we receive our highest development, and realize most fully the solidarity of the race to which we belong.