sphere in which he shall not only

"--dream of summers and dream of flowers
That last alway,"

but find, in an ever-increasing degree, that the dream is merged into
the profoundest reality of experience.

"Present suffering is not enjoyable," said the late Rev. Doctor Maltbie
Davenport Babcock, "but life would be worth little without it. The
difference between iron and steel is fire, but steel is worth all it
costs. Iron ore may think itself senselessly tortured in the furnace,
but when the watch-spring looks back it knows better. David enjoyed pain
and trouble no more than we do, but the time came when he admitted that
they had been good for him. Though the aspect of suffering is hard, the
prospect is hopeful.... The tests of life are to make, not break us. The
blow at the outward man may be the greatest blessing to the inner man.
If God, then, puts, or permits, anything hard in our lives, be sure that
the real peril, the real trouble, is what we shall lose if we flinch or
rebel."

Doctor Babcock's words suggest that there is perhaps nothing in all the
divine teachings that is less understood and less accepted than the
assertion of Saint Paul, "We glory in tribulation also." The general
reader of the gospels and epistles--even the prayerful and reverent
reader--relegates this expression to some abstract conditions, as
something that might do very well for Saint Paul and a rudimentary
civilization; as something that might be a very appropriate and decorous
sentiment for Saint Sebastian on his gridiron, or Saint Catherine
keeping her vigils in the vast and gloomy old church in Siena, but which
certainly can bear no relation and hold no message for the modern
reader. For the electric life of the hour,--full of color and vitality;
throbbing with achievement; the life that craves prosperity as its
truest expression, and finds adversity a poor and mean failure quite
unsuitable to a man of brilliant gifts and energy; the life that
believes in its own right of way and mistakes possessions for
power,--what has _it_ to do with "tribulation" except to refuse it? If
it comes it is met with indignant protest rather than as a phase of
experience in which to "glory;" it is evaded, if possible; and if it
cannot be evaded it is received with rebellion, with gloom, with
despondency, and perhaps, at last, an enforced and hopeless endurance,
which is not, by the way, to be mistaken for resignation. Endurance is a
passive conditio