guishing it. The suffering is caused by the effort of the life to
retain its hold on the form, and yet if the disease succeeds in
breaking the form it has only released the life to find expression in
some higher form. When a guilty man suffers the tortures of remorse,
it means that the truth within him is declaring itself against the
falsehood, although it does not follow that it will immediately
conquer. This is what pain is: it is life pressing upon death, and
death resisting life. If a traveller falls asleep in the snow, or a
sailor is nearly drowned, the process of recovery is always painful
because the returning life has to overcome death. Carry the same
principle through the whole range of human experience, physical,
mental, and moral, and it will indicate the real significance of all
the pain which has ever been endured or ever will be endured by mankind.

Still this would not satisfy everyone who feels compassion for cosmic
suffering. Professor Huxley has told us that there is no sadder story
than the story of sentient life upon this planet, and in so saying he
has the testimony of modern science behind him. A vast amount of
attention has been directed to this phase of the subject within the
past fifty years. We seem to be more sensitive to the presence of pain
as well as more sympathetic than our fathers were, and this tendency
shows itself in a recognition of the solidarity of humanity with the
lower creation. Theology has had practically nothing to say about the
suffering or even about the significance of the myriad forms of life
which exist below the human scale. But why ought they to be ignored?
Indeed, how can they be ignored? The theology that has nothing to say
about my clever and loyal four-footed companion, with his magnanimity,
his sensitive spirit, and even his moral qualities, omits something of
considerable importance to a thorough and consistent world-view. "Not
a sparrow falleth to the ground without your Father," said one who
spake as never man spake. I think it was Schopenhauer who once
remarked, "The more I see of human nature the more I respect my dog."
Now the New Theology finds no difficulty in recognising the importance
of the brute creation, for it believes in a practical recognition of
the solidarity of all existence. There is no life that is not of God,
and therefore no life can ever perish, whatever may become of the form.
If we can explain human suffering, the same explan