THE GIFTS OP SORROW

By this of suffering we oome.

I know tfaat tfaou canst not deny me ;

I know that each pain is a door by which I approach one degree nearer to thee.

What sonow is tbere but I bave sbaied it ?

Wbat grief but it bas removed an obstruction between me and some one else ?

Look in my face and see. You cannot bar me now.

I pass ail doors, and am wbere I would be.^

Pain, more than anything else, with its sharp sting punctures the dividing film. It is the add which dissolves the barriers. It breaks through accmnidated enoiistation, like " a hammer that breaketh the rock into pièces." It ministers to the separated individual entrance into the City of Sdves, and gives him the freedom thereof. It is a constriction which facilitâtes parturition. Just as the penetrating beam of the spring Smi co-operates with the developing, interior, as yet confined, life of the Imago, and helps burst the restraining chrysalis cerement, so that the Life which formerly was bound to the lowly and earthy places manifests its reality as a " winged spirit " ascending into a new, more j oyons, more spacious activity; so is pain the ddiverer of the soûl. It " endures but for a moment " and '' works a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.'*

Grief passes, sonow endures for a moment ; To a certain stage belonging it dogs the fbotsteps of the individual ;

PAIN, THE REDEEMER 148

Then fading and passing it leaves him Iree, a iMfw creatoie, transfigured to more tban mortal. • . .

Not pleasure alone is good, but pain also ; not joy alone, but sorrow ;

Freed mnst the psyché be from tbe papa, and pain îs Hiere to £ree it.

Tfaroes and struggles and clenchings oi teeth — but pain is titiere to free it.

Lo ! the prison walls must fall— «ven tfaough the prisoner tremble.

Long the strain, sometimes seeming past endurance — then the dead sheli gives way, and a new landacape discloses.

Curtain behind curtain, wall behind wall, lile bèhind life;

D3Wg hère, to be bom there, passing and passing and passing,

Ât last a new créature behold, transfigured to more than mortal I

For brief after ail is pain, but joy, ah I joy is etemal I

And thin the veil that divides, the subtle film of illusion —

The prison-wall so slight, at a touch it parts and crumbles.

And opens at length on the sunlit world and the winds of heaven.^

With coiurage, insight, and ail the venturesomeness of the true prophet, C arpenter applies this, which he finds true of the individual, to the larger individual, Society. There is pain m the social body. It has protective value. It an* nounces the présence at that point of active disintegrating forces. It is the index of mal-

* r. IX, p. 364.