THE PROMISE IN PAIN

this. None but the sentimentally pious r^ard the sufïerings of Jésus — to take an obvious example— with pity. So austère, majestic, sublime an agony requires silence, awe, révérence, a humbling of one's self, but pity is, of ail things, most out of place. Our pity is but the betrayal of our own cowardice in the présence of pain« We hâve lived long enough to see what was coming up into the world through Jésus; no such thing as that could be delivered from the heart of a human being without a pain of which only the mothers of the world know the depth ; no such thing could arise in the drcumstances amid which the life of Jésus was set without breakage, profound schism as of an earthquake cracking and distorting the crust of the earth, the loosening of elemental human passions, and an infinité stress issuing in damage to everything, including the redeemer's mortal part, that could be broken and destroyed. Hère we see pain working in ail the nakedness of its truth. The pain which Jésus bore and brought in the world was indicative of a disunity which was rotting Society Uke a disease. It fostered psychic growth, both in the world — for in Christianity the Western world suiïered rebirth ; and in himself — for he was made perf ect — the word means that he came to his blossom — through suff ering ; it mediated the last potentiel in him, which (let it always be remembered) was a race-potential as well as an individual-potential. Pain ever