ersities. Their presence in our world does not excuse
sloth, does not justify a "moral holiday," does not permit us to enjoy
any mere luxury of mystical contemplation of the triumph of the divine
in the world, without ourselves taking our rational and strenuous part
in the actual attainment of such triumph. But what these forms of ill
show us is that there are accessible cases in which if--but only
if--one does the divine will--one {239} can know of the doctrine that
teaches how the divine will can and does become perfect, not through
the mere abolition of evil, but through suffering. Such cases of ill
are true sources of insight. They reveal to us some of the deepest
truths about what loyalty, and spiritual triumph, and the good really
are. They make for salvation. They drive away clouds and bring us face
to face with the will of the world.

I have so far spoken of evil in general. For the present purpose I
need a name for the ills that one rationally faces only when one,
through some essentially active, constructive, moral process,
creatively assimilates and idealise them, and thus wins them over to
be a part of good--not when one merely drives them out of existence.
One name for such ills is Griselda's name: "Adversities." But I have
chosen, in the title of this lecture, to use the vaguer untechnical
name: Sorrow. A great physical pain, you in general cannot, at least
at the moment, idealise. You then and there face it only as something
intolerable, and can see no good except through its mere abolition.
The same is true of any crushing blow of fortune, precisely in so far
as it crushes. All such things you then and there view narrowly. Their
mystery lies in the very fact that they are thus, for the moment, seen
only narrowly. Hence, they are _ipso facto_ hindrances to insight. But
a sorrow--when you use the word you have already begun to assimilate
and idealise the fact that you {240} call a sorrow. That you have
begun to idealise it, the very luxury of deep grief often vaguely
hints, sometimes clearly shows. For sorrows may have already become
tragically precious to you. Would you forget your lost love, or your
dead, or your "days that are no more," even if you could? Is mere
destruction, then, your _only_ tendency in the presence of such
sorrows. A closer view of your attitude toward such sorrows shows that
they are not only clouding but revealing. They begin, they may
endlessly continue, to show you the way into t