Now this, I insist, is insight. It is no "soft" doctrine. It is far
beyond the sort of pragmatism that accepts the test of momentary
results. As far as it goes, it is religious insight. It is insight,
moreover, into the nature of certain ills which cannot, yes, which in
principle, and even by omnipotence, {251} could not, be simply removed
from existence without abolishing the conditions which are logically
necessary to the very highest good that we know. Life in the spirit
simply presupposes the conditions that these ills exemplify.
What sorrow is deeper than the full recognition of one's own now
irrevocable deed, if one has, hereupon, fully to confess that this
deed is, from one's own present point of view, a crime? Yet how could
such ills be simply removed from existence if any range of individual
expression, of freedom, of power to choose is to be left open at all?
How can one possess spiritual effectiveness--the privilege that youth
most ardently demands--without assuming the risk involved in taking
personal responsibility for some aspects of the 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 every loyal experience bear witness.
Now such sorrows, such idealised evils, which are so interwoven with
good that if the precious grief were wholly removed from existence,
the courage, the fidelity, the spiritual self-possession, the peace
through and in and beyond tribulation which such trials alone make
possible, would also be removed--they surely show us that the
abstract principle: "Evil ought to be abolished," is false. They show
us that the divine will also must be made perfect through suffering.
Since we can comprehend the meaning of such experiences only through
resolute action, through courage, through loyalty, through the power
of the spirit, they in no wise justify sloth, or mere passivity, or
mystical idleness. The active dealing with such sorrow gives, as James
himself once well asserts, a new dimension to life. No experiences go
further than do these to show us how, in our loyalty and in our
courage, we are becoming one with the master of life, who through
sorrow overcomes.
Let man, the destroyer, then remember that there is one ill which he
could not destroy, even if he were God, without also destroying all
the spiritual prowess in which all those rejoice who, inspired by an
ambition infinitely above that of Achilles, long {254} to be one with
God through bearing and overcoming the sorrows of a world.
We have thus indicated a source of insight. To tell more about what it
reveals would at once lead me, as you see, close to the most vital of
all Christian teachings, the doctrine of the Atonement. But such a
study belongs elsewhere.
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