VI.

SUFFERING SACRIFICIAL.

PHIL. iii. IO.

The fellowship of his sufferings.

HEN the Apostle said, "None of us

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liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself," he might have added, "And no man suffereth for himself." For it is very evident that the suffering of one man affects more than himself, and is often the cause to others of great advantage. The death of one is the life of another. This seems to be a law stamped on mankind from the hour of birth, when the child wins life at the cost of anguish to another.

In the economy of Nature every plant and insect has its place, and the extinction of one opens the field for the production of another. The moss grows on your lawn and strangles the grass. You lime the soil, murder the moss, and the grass reigns and rejoices over its grave. The massacre of the weeds in your garden iş

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You

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the gain of the flowers that grow there. victimise some that others may thrive. hyacinth bulb buds out fresh bulbs. The flower suffers. You ruthlessly tear away the young bulbs, and consign them to destruction, that the hyacinth may produce splendour of blossom. You prune the fruit tree, you trim the rose. You deliver over the sparrows to death, and the caterpillars multiply and triumph. In the animal and vegetable world the destruction of one individual or race is the gain of other individuals or races. The balance of life must be preserved, and when you subtract a factor here, other factors swell to preserve the equation.

It is so to some extent, though not in the same immediateness, in the world of man.

Let us suppose an island capable of sustaining, at the utmost, a hundred persons. The fruits of the soil, the harvest of the sea, cannot furnish provision for a larger number. Then, when the population swells beyond the hundred, some must be shipped off, in order that the others may live.

For the island substitute the globe. With its limited surface, it can only sustain so many millions of human beings. As the race multiplies, some must be shipped off into another

world, to keep the balance.

Those who wave

their farewells to our shore are expatriated for our sakes. They depart that we may live.

It has been asked, Why did God not create a fixed number of men, at the first? Then, there being no increase in the numbers, there need have been no death to keep the numbers down.

Say that He had created twelve hundred millions of autocthones, who were to exist in deathless life. What would that mean? Why, it would mean that millions of millions of happy lives would never have been called into existence at all,—that you and I would never have been.

The introduction of death into the system made a limited world capable of containing an unlimited succession of generations of happy creatures. It has been a distinct blessing. But for death, they would never have been called into being. Every creature of God is an articulation of the thoughts of God, an idea in the mind of God taking real existence, as an imagination in the human mind can somehow assume real existence under the touch of musician or painter.

If there had been no death in the world, the

world would have been the congealed thoughts of God-not a manifestation of that mind in incessant activity. The problem set by creation was, how to maintain activity of thought within a rigid limit, and that problem is solved by the limitation of each thought by time and space. The infinite is conditioned by the finite.

Pain is, as I have shown, educative. But all pain is not educative to the individual who suffers. It is so only to the great mass of mankind of which the individual is a part; to the body, of which he is a member, often a very inconsiderable and unconsidered member.

That progress is born of experience, and experience is generated by loss and suffering, is true of the individual.

We are always learning by experience, but we often bitterly regret that we have only learned the lessons of life precisely when life is closing in, and the power and period for utilising our gathered experience is exhausted.

But the experience of one serves the purposes of another. Man being a sociable animal, transmits his experiences to his neighbours and descendants. Experiences pass into traditions, and tradition becomes the guide of life. Men

ate, and died of eating, toadstools before man

kind learned to confine itself to mushrooms. When you warn a child to avoid the poisonous berries of the solanum which it is trying to put into its mouth, that child owes its relief from torture and death to the anguish and fatal experience of some person unknown who ate them in ages past. That person unknown in ages past, by his passion, ransomed the child to-day from the grave. His fatal experience became a world-wide tradition, and that tradition was effective to save a child from death, when allured by a poisonous berry. The death of one has been the salvation of many.

I remember, when I was in France many years ago, living near a lucifer-match manufactory, when matches were dipped first in melted sulphur, and then in hot liquid phosphorus, how frequent and horrible were the accidents occurring from the overheating of the pans containing these inflammable materials.

I remember many a permanently disfigured face, and many permanently contracted hands, and many a coffin carried forth, containing the cinder of a poor child who died in flames of liquid inextinguishable phosphorus. I remember the moans and shrieks all night long of a little sufferer in the same street.