apes-but for men with the divine gift of idealism in their souls.

And therefore it was of necessity that the world should be constituted from the beginning with the contingent prospect of the Fall, and provision made for its redress.

And now I think we can see, if only dimly, yet somewhat, through the veil of mystery which involves the origin of pain. Pain is the result of evil, but evil is only possible because man is exalted so high, made partaker of the Divine Nature.

The heavenly spark that was given to mankind cast him chained upon the rock. The heathen saw that, and made it the subject of the greatest tragedy ever produced. Man endowed with the heavenly flame, the flash of soul in the dark chamber of his consciousness, was thereby doomed to suffer. the heathen poet described him. He had tasted of the tree and must therefore die, the sword must pierce through the soul that gave birth to Thought. The chains of hard necessity

So

must bind him who has breathed the air of Freedom, Pegasus winged must draw the plough. Genius must suffer martyrdom. The soul must be smothered by carnal cares. There is no redress, no escape, no hope. Man with a

living, hungering, heaven-climbing soul, with a soul endowed potentially with divine omnipotence, omniscience, and only a little span of life in which it may expand,-this to the heathen's eye was an anomaly.

"Lofty-scheming son of Themis, unwilling I rivet thee, unwilling, in indissoluble shackles on this lonely crag, where, slowly scorched by the glaring sun, thou shalt lose the bloom of thy face, and night in her spangled robe shall veil the light from thee; and the sun again shall disperse the hoar-frost of the morning; and evermore shall the pain of the present evil waste thee; for no one yet born shall release thee."*

*

But how different is the condition of man as seen by the Christian! The shackles are not indissoluble. One has come to preach deliverance to the captives. The crag is not so lonely, for One is at his side whose form is that of the Son of God. The pain of the present evil shall not waste for evermore, for One is born who shall give release. The lot of man is not hopeless. "Behold," says the Christian seer,

* Eschylus, "Prometheus Bound."

"the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God; and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying; neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away."

III.

THE CAPACITY FOR SUFFERING.

I PETER V. 10.

But the God of all grace, after ye have suffered a while, make you perfect.

IN

N my last lecture I showed why it was that pain found a place in God's Creation, -that it was necessitated by the Fall acting retrospectively as well as prospectively, conditioning the world from the laying of its first foundations.

Because man is double in his nature, because he is therefore capable of falling, therefore it is that pain became necessary as a signal bell floating over a rock or shoal in the sailing course of the creature.

Pain in the Order of Justice is a punishment, in the Order of Mercy is a preventive. We shall see this better by-and-by. To-day I must speak of something else—of the capacity for suffering, and what it marks. And I say

that it is a high privilege to have capacity for suffering keenly, whether in the body, or in the intellect, or in the soul.

I think my last lecture led to the threshold of this solemn truth, and must have brought you to suspect it.

The most momentous gift made to man was
Only less momentous was

the Divine Soul.

Each gift entails a respon

the gift of Reason.

sibility, and with

each responsibility lies a

capacity for receiving pleasure of a high order in the right exercise of the gift, and exquisite pain in the wrong exercise of the gift.

Every gift of God opens a sphere of happiness. The gift of life facultates the enjoyment of life. The amoeba lives, a drop of crystal jelly, and tastes in a dim elementary way the pleasure of existence in the running brook, attached to the green watercress.

With the gift of sensation rises the dawn of a new day on animate nature. The first nerve is laid the keel of a new life to be launched in the ocean of being-and it tingles with pleasure. The finger of God traces a circle in the scarce-conscious mass of jelly, and it laughs into vibratory fibres, and dances on the summer

sea.