row walk hand in hand, and have the same message.
On the occasion of which I am thinking I recall distinctly how I said to
her that there was enough suffering in one narrow London lane to show
that God did not love man, and that wherever there was any sorrow, though
but that of a child, in some little garden weeping over a fault that it
had or had not committed, the whole face of creation was completely
marred. I was entirely wrong. She told me so, but I could not believe
her. I was not in the sphere in which such belief was to be attained to.
Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible
explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the
world. I cannot conceive of any other explanation. I am convinced that
there is no other, and that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been
built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no
other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the
full stature of its perfection. Pleasure for the beautiful body, but
pain for the beautiful soul.

When I say that I am convinced of these things I speak with too much
pride. Far off, like a perfect pearl, one can see the city of God. It
is so wonderful that it seems as if a child could reach it in a summer's
day. And so a child could. But with me and such as me it is different.
One can realise a thing in a single moment, but one loses it in the long
hours that follow with leaden feet. It is so difficult to keep 'heights
that the soul is competent to gain.' We think in eternity, but we move
slowly through time; and how slowly time goes with us who lie in prison I
need not tell again, nor of the weariness and despair that creep back
into one's cell, and into the cell of one's heart, with such strange
insistence that one has, as it were, to garnish and sweep one's house for
their coming, as for an unwelcome guest, or a bitter master, or a slave
whose slave it is one's chance or choice to be.

And, though at present my friends may find it a hard thing to believe, it
is true none the less, that for them living in freedom and idleness and
comfort it is more easy to learn the lessons of humility than it is for
me, who begin the day by going down on my knees and washing the floor of
my cell. For prison life with its endless privations and restrictions
makes one rebellious. The most terrible thing about it is not that it
breaks one's heart--hearts are made t