Part 5
“When a man is laboring under the pain of any distemper it is then that he recollects there is a God and that he is but a man. No mortal is then the object of his envy, his admiration or his contempt; and, having no malice to gratify, the tales of slander excite him not.” This is the testimony of a heathen, Pliny, who was himself an invalid. Sixteen centuries later an Anglican divine, Jeremy Taylor, voiced a similar conviction. “In sickness the soul begins to dress herself for immortality. At first she unties the strings of vanity that made her upper garments cleave to the world and sit uneasy.”
Even during the materialistic nineteenth century we find Dr. Samuel Smiles declaring: “Suffering is doubtless as divinely appointed as joy, while it is much more influential as a discipline of character. It chastens and sweetens the nature, teaches patience and resignation and promotes the deepest as well as the most exalted thoughts.”
Latterly there have been indications that this time-honored conception is again becoming more universally recognized. For instance, during the darkest days of the war the Bishop of London writes that he had “come to believe that a painless world is a world not regenerate but degenerate.”
Who shall say that the revival of religious feeling which is now taking place is not due to the physical and mental suffering entailed by the war?
I should like to linger on the spiritual value of suffering, yet I feel I am on very delicate ground. For the spirit is so gloriously independent of the flesh, that it can expand under any circumstances and in any habitation. St. Hildegarde believed “God could not dwell in a healthy body,” and St. Ignatius Loyola that “a healthy mind in a healthy body is the best instrument with which to serve God.” Yet he himself had a shattered body.
The efficacy of suffering in promoting the growth of the spirit seems to me to lie chiefly in the fact that it does for us what we so seldom have the courage to do for ourselves. It sweeps away all the rubbish and dust of life. In the blessed emptiness induced by this mental house-cleaning we are able, often for the first time, to separate clearly the essential from the unessential. In sickness soul and body demand instinctively only that which is for each its most imperative necessity.
In the crucible of suffering the true essence of our character becomes manifest. All our pitiable pretences are torn from us, leaving our inherent self face to face with reality. It is a tremendous experience; it must either break us or make us. It is for us to choose which it shall be. Suffering is the ultimate test of character.
Yet as I write these words I find myself wondering if there is any one ultimate test. As no two crystals react to the same solvent, so it may be that no two hearts respond to the same probe. Of one thing, nevertheless, I am certain: to each of us is applied at some time in our lives that which constitutes for that individual soul the supreme trial of its mettle.
I am frequently reminded, however, that there are countless people who, instead of being purified and sensitized by physical pain, have been destroyed or at least rendered sterile by it. This is undoubtedly true. Whether we are to profit by suffering or not depends entirely on ourselves. How then are we to transmute pain into privilege? Certainly not through resignation, for there is no virtue without action. It may only be the interior travail of the spirit, but to attain even the initial step to spiritual, intellectual or material advancement necessitates labor. So it is with the benefits of suffering. They are there within the reach of all, but can only be obtained as the wage of persistent endeavor.
Resignation is not merely inactive, it is positively harmful inasmuch as it is a tacit acknowledgment that pain is in itself an evil, and to believe that is to stultify its possibilities. For what we believe to be evil, no matter how innocent in itself, becomes so by the corrosive power of that belief.
It is a dogma of Christianity that disease is one of the punitive consequences of original sin. Now punishment implies correction. Therefore, if disease represents a fall from perfection, it also holds within it the germs of a future perfection. Although theology teaches sin as the inception of disease, yet if we consider only the immediate cause of our physical disabilities we will find that although they are frequently the result of breaking a moral law, they are quite as frequently to be attributed to no fault of our own, and may even be the emblem of sacrifice.
If so many fail to benefit through suffering, we must remember that only a few of us are able to sustain the daily test of life. Every experience, especially any great and unusual experience, is a fire through which few pass unscathed. Beauty, charm, riches, personality, even intellect, have each their separate temptation, their different limitations.
It is so easy for the spirit to sleep contented within the soft prison of a perfect body. Superabundant health and vitality, unless guided by infinite wisdom, are as likely to cast us into the abyss of life as to raise us to the summit. Power fosters pride, and charm is the twin-sister of vanity. Life is a continuous trial of our strength, but disease is not necessarily the supreme trial.
It was George Eliot who said: “There is nothing the body suffers the soul may not profit by.”
XIX CONCLUSION
Who best can suffer, best can do.
—_Milton._
We have seen that as mankind rises in the scale of civilization the body becomes increasingly less important. Nevertheless, I wish it to be clearly understood, that I do not maintain that it is preferable to be ill than well, but only that each state has its own peculiar privileges, which are rarely interchangeable.
Health and sickness are merely different roads to achievement. The earth requires rain as well as sunshine; we need both tears and laughter; navvies are necessary and so are philosophers.
You may therefore reasonably ask why, if suffering is indispensable to humanity, doctors and sociologists should spend themselves and their lives in attempting to banish it from the world?
Because, if pain is the gate through which we must pass to attain certain experiences and realizations, to battle against it is undoubtedly the road to others. To endure pain and to relieve pain are both instrumental in freeing us from the prison of ourselves, and freedom from self is the only real freedom. Moreover, whatever ameliorates human conditions, whether serums or sanitation, free concerts or fireless cookers, results in loosing us from the thraldom of the body.
The race reaches toward an ideal of ultimate perfection, just as a plant stretches upward towards the sun. Both are unattainable, yet all activity would cease, if we demanded nothing less than absolute and indestructible achievement. The tide flows only to ebb, the field must be sown anew year after year; we build cities knowing that time will eventually destroy them; we bear children doomed to death.
But after the ebb comes the tide, bringing ever new treasures to our shores; the germ of spring lies hidden in the barren breast of autumn; out of the ashes of vast cities still greater cities will arise, and Death is but the portal of Life.
No physical disablement is a barrier to achievement. This is the glorious fact which the illustrious men and women I have enumerated have proved beyond the possibility of dispute. To cripple and hunchback, to blind, deaf and dumb, to those chained to “a mattress-grave,” and to those who have been mentally unbalanced, they have bequeathed this precious legacy of Hope.
On the other hand we can no longer plead our infirmities as an excuse for our weakness, our sterility or failure. For whatever may be our disablement we can find in history a parallel debility triumphantly transmuted into strength.
THE END
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling. 2. Retained anachronistic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed. 3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.