ain in God's world, but in the
apparent absence, in so many instances, of any discernible purpose in
pain. In itself, pain does not, or at least should not, conflict with
the highest moral conception which we can form of the character of God.
But purposeless pain, if such really occur anywhere in the universe, is
hard indeed to reconcile with the revelation of the Highest as Infinite
and Eternal Love. The real answer to the problem lies in our gradually
dawning perception of the high purposes which pain subserves.

It is well, then, to remind ourselves of the teaching of natural science
in regard to the function of pain in the animal world. There, at least,
it has originated, and has survived, only because of its actual use to
the possessors of that nervous system which makes pain possible. It
serves as a danger signal of such inestimable value that no race of
animals, of any high degree of organisation, which could be incapable of
suffering pain, could for any length of time continue to survive. Pain
here, at any rate, so far from being purposeless, owes its existence to
the purpose which it subserves.

Ascending higher in the scale of being we see, as has been recently
pointed out, that the progress of human civilisation has been very
largely due to the successful efforts of man to resist and to remove
pain. The most successful and progressive races of mankind are those
which inhabit regions of the world where the conditions of life are
neither so severe as to paralyse all exertion, or even to preclude its
possibility, nor so favourable that men can avoid the pain of hunger or
of cold without strenuous and unremitting effort. The stimulus of pain
has been the means of perfecting the animal nature of man, and the secret
of those victories which he has won over the inclement or dangerous
forces of the material world, and which we call, in their totality, human
civilisation.

And thus we come in sight of a great law, "perfection through suffering."
And the revelation of the Cross is the exhibition to us of this law
acting in the higher reaches of man's existence, in the moral and
spiritual regions of his life. As the animal has gained its victories in
the past, so the spiritual is advancing towards the final triumph of man,
along the same path, of healthy reaction stimulated and necessitated by
pain.

For wherein lies the triumph of the spiritual nature, save in its
complete and sovereign control over all the