The Great Mystery
THE MYSTERY OF suffering! The great eternal problem! And yet no problem at all, if we only consider it as a Law of Being. Apart altogether from the higher and transcendent and beautiful teachings of religion, which place an aureole around the crown of thorns on each wounded head, and throw the iridescence of hope athwart the gloomiest and darkest sky, is it not in the nature of things that suffering is inevitable? I look at it under three aspects: (1) As a necessary condition of imperfect beings; (2) as a necessary motive power in carrying on the work of existence; (3 ) as an unconscious but most noble revelation to higher beings than we are of facts and principles in the great economy of creation that perhaps otherwise would be hidden from them for ever. I know perfectly that all these philosophical reasonings cannot mitigate pain any more than reasoning can disarm Death of its terrors, or soothe an excruciating physical torment. I know no philosophical talisman for anguish or sorrow, except that final hope of suffering humanity: All things have an end. But, nevertheless, it may be in our painless moments a soothing thought that suffering is not the unreasoning and inconsiderate infliction on helpless beings of pain from the hands of a supreme and arbitrary power; but that behind it there may be grave motives and far-reaching designs which our imperfect knowledge may feebly grasp, if we cannot always hold fast to them as a consolatory remedy for our weakness and our woes.
It is strange that men will not see how suffering is the inevitable accompaniment of our state of existence. Whether man has fallen from a state of perfection according to Christian truth and belief, keeping still some vague tradition of that happy condition in his eternal dream of the perfectability of the race; or whether, in the evolutionist theory, he is supposed to be struggling upwards from primary elements towards more spacious conditions and final developments, it must be admitted that this his intermediate state is a state of imperfection, with all the blunted senses, stunted faculties, darkened intellect, and weakened will, that denote a fallen or struggling being. In such a state, suffering is inevitable. Death must be preluded by disease; and the aspiring soul must beat its wings in fruitless efforts to touch an ideal that is ever present, and ever unattainable. Hence, the sublime dissatisfaction that ever haunts the dreams of mortals—the never satisfied craving and hunger after an indefinable something that ever eludes us, and that is not to be attained, no matter how frequently we change the surroundings of life and seek to satisfy our unquenchable desires. Hence come mental pain and anxiety—“the looking before and after and pining for what is not,” of which the poet speaks—the restlessness and irritability, the exaggeration of trifles, the sad presentiments of the future, the bitter remorse for neglected opportunities that beset the weary way,—the via dolorosa of human life.
Nothing begins and nothing ends,
That is not paid with moan;
For we are born in others' pain,
And perish in our own.
Again, there can be no progress without pain. In pain are we brought forth into the world; in pain do we grow and increase; in pain, perhaps painless pain, do we die. But never a forward step is taken by man or society without pain and suffering. The whole development of human character is wrought, and can only be wrought, by self-denial and suffering, by the patient bearing of weary burdens, by the crushing of one's own will, by the forehead wrinkled and the face agonised under the pressure of torture. All the finest faculties of our nature remain dormant until they wake under the sharp accolade of pain. We all know the beauty of a suffering creature—the unspeakable beauty of death. It is only the sharp chisel of pain that can round the lineaments into such perfect and ethereal loveliness….
The social body, too, is moved ahead along the wheels of suffering. It is a sad truth that the horrors of war appear to be the necessary preliminaries to advancing civilisation. Every great forward movement in human history has been preluded by conquest. Degeneracy is the adjunct of continued peace. Hence the school of thinkers who maintain that war is a necessity for eliminating the weaker elements of a nation and developing its strength!
Is it peace or war? better, war! loud war by land and sea,
War with a thousand battles, and shaking a hundred thrones.
It is famine, too, that scattered the civilising races over the earth. The surplus populations in the old countries, driven to distress and despair by over-crowding, fled their own land with its congested millions, and carried civilisation across seas and lands to black and tawny savages. These in turn yielded under the sword, and the “white man” triumphed. We cannot say much for the morality of such progress: but we are speaking of facts. Famine drove forth the conquerors; the conquered perished by the sword. Civilisation followed in the wake of the latter; that is, along the valleys of suffering and death. The path of progress is the path of pain. Bleached bones and broken hearts mark every inch of its way.
But there is a third consideration, which is for ever rising up before my mind. I can hardly conceive anything so absurd as the proud claim made by us, denizens of this little planet, that we represent the acme of perfection in God's universe; that we are the objective of all evolutionary processes,—the sum total and crowning-point of all the mysterious designs and occult operations of the universe. Man has always seemed to me to be the lowest representative of intellect in the Universe, if he is the highest animal. And I never had the least doubt that there are species and types beyond the limit, of spiritual and intellectual essences, either resident, as we are, in planetary worlds, or diffused universally through the ether in which the universe is enveloped. Our conceptions of the seraphim and the cherubim would represent the highest attainable grade in spiritual perfections. But between the seraphim and man, what a mighty gulf interposes! What a vast space to be peopled with great spirits I And what tremendous possibilities for the exercise of the never-tiring, ever-plastic attribute of God's omnipotence!
…Now each tiniest item of creation works outward and upward, subserving some higher species. Its energies are not limited to its own existence or welfare; nor even to the continuance and preservation of its own kind. It is the Altruism of Nature—the design of making all things cooperate in one single plan; each working for some higher existence than its own, and subserving some higher and hidden purpose far beyond its ken. For, just as each drop of rain serves the ulterior purpose of carrying salts to the sea; as the coral insect builds an island, and then a continent, while it perishes; as the tiny shellfish dies, after extracting from its viscera the material that goes to build yonder cathedral; so every human life has some ulterior purpose, as yet but dimly guessed, but yet most certainly to be revealed. And, as the rabbit or guinea-pig in the hands of the scientist knows nothing in its pain of the vast purposes it subserves, and only knows that it is passing through a mysterious trial under the hands of some superior and powerful being, so we, too, are ignorant of the purposes which we serve throughout the universe of God by the mysterious agency of labour and pain and suffering.
And may it not happen that, as the shrinking animal gives ideas that are helpful to the higher species of its own creation, so we also may be the means, through labour, agony, and even death, of communicating larger knowledge, nay, perhaps wider help, to beings of whose existence we can form but a vague comprehension, but who are as far beyond us as we are beyond the beasts that perish and are dumb? And may there not be some supreme science, some synthesis of all earthly sciences, such as we are always seeking after, but never attaining; and that all this human pain and suffering under which we blindly labour, and which sometimes seems to us such an infliction of unnecessary cruelty on the part of an all-powerful but capricious Being, are contributory to the perfecting of that science, just as the toxin in the veins of an afflicted beast reveals some secret to the eye of a scientist, who in turn builds therefrom some great theory fraught with illimitable and beneficial consequences to suffering mankind?
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