SUFFERING
The problem of the meaning of suffering and evil in the world is the
greatest natural mystery that man has to face. It has raised the
question as to whether life is worth living or not in some minds. It
causes a great many people to be disturbed about the meaning of life
and has led some sensitive people to conclude that there cannot be an
overseeing, all-wise Providence since otherwise He would surely
prevent all the needless suffering there is in the world. Biologists,
owing to their occupation with the thought of the struggle for
existence in current theories of evolution, have been particularly
inclined to say that they could not think that there was a Providence
because there was so much of carnage in nature, so much ruthless
destruction of life amid suffering for which it would be hard to find
any satisfactory reason. There has been no little exaggeration in this
view, for a calm review of conditions as they obtain in nature shows
not so much of active contest as a healthy competition for the means
of existence, in the midst of which death comes to the weakling
without anything like the suffering so much emphasized.
It must not be forgotten that the supersensitiveness of the sedentary
student must be taken into account in the appreciation of the
significance of such a declaration, {255} for the recluse scientist
often shrinks from trials that the active outdoors man finds only a
stimulus to action, which serve to develop powers and give
satisfaction rather than any real suffering. The incentive to have
life and to have it more abundantly which this affords to heartier
natures makes the poet's expression, _forsan et haec olim meminisse
juvabit_, "perhaps we shall be glad to recall these hardships in the
time to come", easy to appreciate. Life without suffering would lack
that contrast which saves it from the dull monotony that might tempt
to waste of energy in dissipation.
Perhaps the best illustration of the actual benefit to man which
accrues from suffering is to be found in the fact that one of the
surprising results of the presence of the mystery of suffering in the
world is that meditation over it has given rise to the five greatest
dramatic poems that were ever written. Men contemplating it have been
led to the expression of the deepest thoughts that have ever stirred
minds. These great poems have come at longer and shorter intervals
during four thousand years, from Job, the essential ideas for which
probably date from about 1800 B.C., though its literary form is much
later, through AEschylus' "Prometheus", Shakespeare's "Hamlet",
Calderon's "The Wonder-working Magician", down to Goethe's "Faust." Of
these five dramatizations of the mystery of human suffering, recurring
poetic impersonations of Hamlet's
"The time is out of joint: O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!"
the greatest, as conceded by all the critics, is not--as might be
expected from the very prevalent impression that man makes wonderful
progress down the ages--the {256} last one, Goethe's "Faust", but is
the first one, Job. No one has ever expressed so well the only
reasonable attitude of mind that man must take in the presence of evil
and suffering as this "man of the land of Hus whose name was Job and
who was simple and upright and fearing God and avoiding evil", yet who
had to bear some of the severest trials that man has ever been called
upon to undergo.
Mr. H. G. Wells has recently, in one of his thought-stimulating
novels, shown us that verisimilitude of the most modern type could be
woven into a story which followed the outlines of the book of Job very
closely, so that far from being dead, even the novelty-seeking fiction
readers of our generation have brought home to them the fact that Job
is still a very living piece of literature. Job's answer to the
mystery of evil is that man must confess his inability to understand
it, but he can trust the God who "thunders wonderfully with His voice"
and "doth great and unsearchable things", "who commandeth the snow to
go down on the earth and the winter rain", "who knoweth what ways the
light spreads and heat divideth on the earth", "who joins together the
shining stars, the pleiads, and can stop the turning about of
Arcturus" and "who created behemoth and leviathan and can bind the
rhinoceros and has fashioned the ostrich." All that Job can say is, "I
know that Thou canst do everything and that no thought can be
withholden from Thee", therefore for any impatience that he may have
displayed over his suffering he reprehends himself and promises to do
penance in dust and ashes,--"and after this Job lived one hundred and
forty years and saw his sons and his sons' sons, even four
generations. So Job died, being old and full of days."
{257}
In any consideration of suffering, above all in connection with the
related subjects of health and religion, we must not forget that
suffering has always been a badge of the race, the common lot of men,
so that this very community of it greatly reduces human reaction
toward it, since the sufferer cannot help but note that every one else
must submit to it as well as himself. At times among those who fail to
think deeply enough this may be doubted. The poor may even envy the
rich because they suppose that they must by their riches escape
suffering, but most physicians soon learn to appreciate very well that
the mental discomforts of the wealthy, their disappointed social
ambitions, their thwarted aspirations after greater wealth, their envy
of their more successful neighbors, but above all their frequent
disappointment in their children, though it is almost invariably their
very wealth that has spoiled the children and brought their greatest
griefs on them, are really the source of much more genuine suffering
than the poor have to bear. The worries of life increase with
possessions, not decrease, as is fondly hoped, and as the author of
the "Romance of the Rose" said some seven centuries ago:
"And he who what he holds esteems
Enough, is rich beyond the dreams
Of many a dreary usurer.
And lives his life-days happier far;
For nought it signifies what gains
The wretched usurer makes, the pains
Of poverty afflict him yet
Who having, struggleth still to get."
Suffering must ever remain a mystery, especially when we take into
account the fact that all of us are profoundly possessed by the desire
for happiness. We can never {258} probe to the bottom of the mystery
and know all its meaning, but at least we can readily understand that
in the vast majority of cases, instead of being an evil, it is a good.
Nothing so deepens and develops character as suffering. Take the case
of our young men who went to the war--so many of them scarcely more
than boys, feeling but little of the responsibilities of life--and see
how they have come back to us matured by the hardships and sufferings
through which they had to go. Thucydides said nearly twenty-five
hundred years ago, "There is very little difference among men, only a
few of them rise above the great mass because they have gone through
hard things when they were young."
It would seem as though we had changed all that, for we are deeply
intent on making things just as easy as possible for the young, but a
generation ago Gladstone repeated Thucydides' expression with
heartiest approval, and twenty years ago John Morley, writing the life
of Gladstone, agreed with both of them. I wonder if there are two men
in our time who have known men better than Gladstone and Morley.
In that sense suffering is no mystery, and it is easy to see how it is
quite literally true that "Whom the Lord loves He chastises." It is
the chastisement of suffering that brings out the powers of men. Any
one who has not had to suffer in life is nearly always a self-centered
egoist without sympathy, but above all without that fellow feeling
that comes only from having gone through similar experience. He who
has not suffered has not really lived below the surface of his being
at all, and he does not know himself. To "know thyself" is the most
important thing in the world and the only way to know others. The men
who have done great thinking for us {259} have nearly always been men
who had to suffer much. It was a blind Milton who wrote "Paradise
Lost." When Camoens wrote what German and French critics think--and
when Germans and French agree about anything there is probably a deep
underlying truth in it--the greatest epic in modern time, he was
starving in a garret, and his old Indian servant was begging for him
on the streets to secure enough to keep body and soul together until
the great work was finished. Cervantes wrote what Lord Macaulay called
"incomparably the greatest novel ever written" in a debtor's prison,
out of which it seemed he might never be able to secure his release.
Dante wrote what many think the greatest poem ever written during a
long exile in which he learned "how bitter it is to eat the bread of
other's tables." _Poeta laudatur et alget,_ "the poet is praised and
starves", is as true in our time as when Horace said it three
thousand years ago.
Goldwin Smith has brought out very clearly the fact that suffering and
evil are really a necessity in the world if this is to be a place of
trial, as every one believes, for of course such a belief represents
the only satisfactory explanation of life as we have it. Man must have
something to strive for and against if there are to be stepping stones
of our dead selves to higher things, and so it is not surprising that
Doctor Goldwin Smith should have said:
"At the same time, so far as we can discern, character can be formed
only by an effort which implies something against which to strive;
so that without evil or what appears to us evil, character could not
be formed. The existence of evil in fact, so far as we can see, is
the necessary condition of active life."
Suffering has been with us from the beginning and it will always be
with us; instead of an evil it is one of God's {260} great gifts to
man, and yet it sometimes makes little souls bitter and swamps the
efforts of those who cannot rise above its trials. Religion is the one
element that is supremely helpful in this. Above all in the terminal
sufferings of mankind, when there is no longer any question of pain
that has to be borne in developing character for this life, the only
consolation is that to be derived from religion and a firm belief in a
hereafter and an acknowledgment of the fact that somehow God knows
best and all is for the best. Without this the awful suffering from
cancer which is increasing rather than diminishing, and which seems to
be so rooted in human nature that we shall probably never solve its
mystery or at least be able to secure human nature against it, as well
as ever so many other chronic sources of pain that will never cease
entirely until the end of life comes, become hideous specters for
humanity, and suffering has very little meaning.
No matter what our attitude of mind may be with regard to suffering,
there is no question but that we have to stand it under present
conditions in this little world of ours. During the next twelve months
scarcely less than one hundred thousand persons will die of cancer in
this country and a million and a half victims of the disease will
breathe their last throughout the world. When we add up all the
accidents in industry and transportation, all the wounds in war and
civil life, and then add the affections which in one way or another
cause mechanical stoppages of processes in the body, for these are the
exquisitely painful conditions, it is easy to understand that we need
consolation for suffering. An old medical axiom is that "the doctor
can seldom cure but he can often relieve and can always console."
There are a good many physicians, however, who feel their ability to
console sadly {261} hampered by the fact that so many men and women in
our time do not believe in a hereafter for which their sufferings in
this world can be a preparation, and that therefore the terminal
suffering of existence, of which there is and manifestly always will
be such an amount, can mean nothing for them except just so much pain
that has to be borne without any good reason that they can see, except
that somehow or other things were so arranged in this world that there
is ever so much more of pain and suffering than of joy in it.
Two thousand years ago Cicero said in his own oratorical way that it
was better for all of us to believe in immortality, for if there was
no immortality we should never live after death to know it--which
comes very near being an Irish bull by anticipation--while if there
was, and we had not believed in it, there would come a very rude
awakening to the truth of things. Something of the same problem has
been put in much more flippant and yet very expressive way in modern
slang. "If there is no other world than this, then some one handed us
an awful lemon when we were sent into existence." That is, I suppose,
one answer to the mystery of suffering so sure to come to all men in
some way or other, and it is one that counsels us to seek the only
real consolation for suffering,--that which is to be found in the
religious feeling that somehow or other, somewhere, there is some one
who knows and understands, and suffering has its meaning. "God's in
His heaven and all's well with the world" in spite of the fact that
"nature red in tooth and claw" works such sad havoc with her
creatures.
What the belief in immortality and the feeling that this life is
merely its portico can accomplish in giving a man equanimity in the
face of disappointments and patient {262} fortitude under even
atrocious pain is very well illustrated by what Professor William
James has to say of Thomas Davidson in his essay on him. [Footnote
9] Davidson died of cancer at a comparatively early age, considering
the length of life that many scholars enjoy, and for many years he
had prepared a large amount of material for that history of the
interaction of Greek, Christian Hebrew and Arabic thought on one
another before the revival of learning which was to be his Magnum
Opus. Davidson was destined never to finish the work. Professor James,
who had been an intimate friend and was so close to him in the
organization of the Glenmore School of the Culture Sciences on
Hurricane Mountain at the head of Keene Valley in the Adirondacks, had
felt the possibility of this accident of destiny and had inquired of
Davidson with regard to his great prospective work.
[Footnote 9: "Memories and Studies", New York, 1911. ]
"Knowing how short his life might be, I once asked him whether he
felt no concern lest the work already done by him should be
frustrate, from the lack of its necessary complement, in case he
were suddenly cut off. His answer surprised me by its indifference.
He would work as long as he lived, he said, but not allow himself to
worry, and would look serenely at whatever might be the outcome.
This seemed to me uncommonly high-minded. I think that Davidson's
conviction of immortality had much to do with such a superiority to
accidents. On the surface and toward small things, he was irritable
enough, but the undertone of his character was remarkable for
equanimity. He showed it in his final illness, of which the misery
was really atrocious. There were no general complaints or
lamentations about the personal situation or the arrest to his
career. It was the human lot, and {263} he must even bear it; so he
kept his mind upon objective matter."
Only a profound conviction of personal immortality will enable a man
who feels that he is cut off in the midst of his work to bear with
patience the final ailment which by its very progress is precluding
the possibility of accomplishing the task that he had set himself. Yet
this interruption of their chosen labor inevitably comes to a great
many men; for death, no matter how late it may seem to onlookers to
occur, happens untimely to most of humanity, even though they may
count up years far beyond the threescore and ten of the Psalmist.
The greatest resource in the midst of the suffering caused by the war
for soldiers and civilians has been religion. It was sadly needed, but
it was magnificently employed. Any one who saw how much their religion
meant to the soldiers who really had faith will appreciate very well
how valuable it was for them. Many a man who had given up his faith,
and this was particularly true of the French, found a new power to
dare and to do, and also to bear and to "carry on" in the religion
that it had seemed they could so readily dispense with before.
Colton, writing a series of aphorisms in "Lacon", a century ago,
declared that there are three arguments for atheism more effective
than any others,--health and wealth and friends. When we have our
health and an abundance of money at command, besides many and powerful
friends who seem willing to do everything that they can for us, we
feel but little need of God and then many men refuse to believe in
him. Necessity is a very precious thing, the mother not only of
invention, but of reverence and many other good qualities. But when
suffering comes, especially if wealth, and in that case of course,
{264} friends, have disappeared, God is a very firm support to lean
on. Many a man has found his faith again under such circumstances and
has realized how flimsy were the veils which he had allowed to come
between him and his recognition of his obligations to his Creator.
The presence of suffering and evil in the world has provided us with
one of the most striking arguments for the existence of God and of a
hereafter that we have. As Goldwin Smith said:
"This at all events is certain: if death is to end all alike for the
righteous and for the unrighteous, for those who have been blessings
and for those who have been curses to their kind, the Power which
rules the universe cannot be just in any sense of the word which we
can understand."
Doctor Carroll, in "The Mastery of Nervousness" [Footnote 10] has
summed up the value of suffering as a revealer of power and a bracer
of strength in words that are worth remembering. "None knows his real
strength till he has faced failure and tasted the bitterness of
defeat. Physical and mental suffering and soul pain come to all that
endurance may be developed, for without this the strength which
conquers can never be. The master man laughs in the face of personal
hurts; offenses fail to offend, insults fail to embitter; he turns
with shame from the so-called depths of suffering; for him honor and
majesty of soul are found upon the heights of suffering." In a word
the really brave man does not let himself sink under the burden of
suffering but maintains his place and stands up firmly under it. Under
these circumstances suffering, instead of being an evil, is a good.
After the showing of mercy, man is likest to God when he stands
suffering bravely and brings good out of evil even as Providence does.
[Footnote 10: Macmillan, New York, 1918.]
{265}