lives of our fellows?
As for our blunders, what more precious privilege do we all claim than
the privilege of making our own blunders, or at least a due proportion
of them? When we act, every act is done for eternity, since it is
irrevocable. When we love, we ask the privilege to bind up other
destinies with our own. The tragedies of such a world as ours are,
therefore, not such as could be simply wiped out of existence, unless
one were ready to deprive every individual personality both of its
range of free choice and of its effectiveness of action. When we
suffer, then, in such a world, we know indeed that there need have
been no such suffering had there been no world at all. But precisely
when our ills are most bound up with {252} our own personal wills, we
know that no mere removal of such ills could have occurred without the
abolition of all the conditions which our spiritual freedom, our
longing for effectiveness, and our love for union with other
personalities make us regard as the conditions of the highest good. No
God could conceivably give you the good of self-expression without
granting you the privilege, not only of choosing wrongly, but of
involving your brethren in the results of your misdeed. For when you
love your kind, you aim to be a factor in their lives; and to deprive
you of this privilege would be to insure your total failure. But if
you possess this privilege, you share in a life that, in proportion to
its importance and depth and range and richness of spiritual
relations, is full of the possibilities of tragedy.

Face such tragedy, however, and what does it show you? The
possibility, not of annulling an evil, or of ceasing to regret it, but
of showing spiritual power, first, through idealising your grief, by
seeing even through this grief the depth of the significance of our
relations as individuals to one another, to our social order, and to
the whole of life; secondly, through enduring your fortune; and
thirdly, through conquering, by the might of the spirit, those goods
which can only be won through such sorrow. What those goods are, the
convict has just, if only in small part, told us. Griselda told us
something about them which is much deeper still. For adversity and
loyalty are, indeed, simply inseparable {253} companions. There could
not be loyalty in a world where the loyal being himself met no
adversities that personally belonged to and entered his own inner
life. That this is true, let