,
and death for a popular cause will idealize the memory of very ordinary or
questionable characters. But if the character of a leader is pure,
suffering accredits him and gives him power. The cross had an incomparable
value in putting the cause of Christianity before the world. It placed
Jesus where mankind could never forget him, and it lit up the whole
problem of sin and redemption with the fire of the greatest of all
tragedies.

"The cross, bold type of shame to homage turned,
Of an unfinished life that sways the world."

IV

But not all righteous suffering is socially effective. A good man may be
suppressed before he has won a following, or even before he has wrought
out his message in his own mind, and his suppression leaves only a few
bubbles on the waters of oblivion. In that case his life has failed to
discharge the redemptive force contained in it. It only adds a little more
to the horror and tragedy of a sinful, deaf, and blood-stained world. Many
of the men whose lives ebbed away behind the cruel silence of the walls of
the Spanish Inquisition, were such men as Spain needed most. What saving
effect did their death exercise? The uncounted patriots whose chains have
clanked on the march to Siberian exile, have not yet freed Russia from its
blind oligarchy. Our faith is that their lives were dear to God, and that
their sorrows and the bitter tears of those who loved them are somehow
part of an accumulating force which will one day save Russia. But this is
religious faith, "a conviction of things not seen." We can not prove it.
We can only trust.

Meanwhile it is our business to see that no innocent blood is wasted. Pain
is a merciful and redemptive institution of nature when pain acts as an
alarm-bell to direct intelligent attention to the cause of the pain. If
pain does not force the elimination of its own cause, it is an added evil.
The death of the innocent, through oppression, child labor, dirt diseases,
or airless tenements, ought to arrest the attention of the community and
put the social cause of their death in the limelight. In that case they
have died a vicarious death which helps to redeem the rest from a social
evil, and anyone who utilizes their suffering for that end, shows his
reverence for their death. We owe that duty in even higher measure to the
prophets, who are not passive and unconscious victims, but who set
themselves intelligently in opposition to evil. The moral soundne