he spiritual realm and
the nature of this realm.

By sorrow, then, I here mean an experience of ill which is not wholly
an experience of that which as you then and there believe ought to be
simply driven out of existence. The insight of which sorrow is the
source, is an insight that tends to awaken within you a new view of
what the spiritual realm is. This view is not in the least what some
recent writers have blindly proclaimed it to be--a philosopher's
artificial abstraction--a cruel effort to substitute a "soft" doctrine
of the study for a moral and humane facing of the "hard" facts of
human life. No, this view is the soul of the teaching of all the
world's noblest and most practical guides to the most concrete living.
This view faces hardness, it endures and overcomes. Poets, prophets,
martyrs, sages, artists, the heroes of spirituality of every land and
clime, have found in it comfort, resolution, and triumph. The
philosopher, at best, can report what {241} these have seen. And
"soft," indeed, is the type of thoughtful effort which declines to
follow with its ideas what all these have learned to express in their
lives and in their religion.

V

Because I am here not stating for you a merely speculative doctrine
concerning the place of evil in a good and rational spiritual world, I
once more need, at this point, to appeal as directly as I can to life.
Let me present to you, from recent literature, a noteworthy instance
of the use of our present source of insight. The instance is
confessedly one where no complete and determinate religious creed is
defended as the result of the use of the insight in question. And an
actually eternal truth about the spiritual world--a very old truth in
the lore of the wise, but a deeply needed truth for our own day--is
illustrated by the instance which the tale portrays.

I refer to a recent short story, published in the _Atlantic Monthly_
for November, 1910, and written by Cornelia A. P. Comer. It is
entitled "The Preliminaries." It is, to my mind, an impressive union
of a genuinely effective realism and a deep symbolism. The characters
are very real human beings. Their problem is one of the most familiar
problems of daily life--the problem as to the advisability of the
proposed marriage of two young lovers. The {242} conditions of the
problem are hard facts, of a general type that is unfortunately
frequent enough under our confusing modern conditio