The mystery of suffering Author:Sabine Baring-Gould Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. THE CAPACITY FOR SUFFERING. i Peter v. 10. But the God of all grace, after ye have suffered a while, make you perfect. IN my last lecture I show... more »ed why it was that pain found a place in God's Creation, —that it was necessitated by the Fall acting retrospectively as well as prospectively, conditioning the world from the laying of its first foundations. Because man is double in his nature, because he is therefore capable of falling, therefore it is that pain became necessary as a signal bell floating over a rock or shoal in the sailing course of the creature. Pain in the Order of Justice is a punishment, in the Order of Mercy is a preventive. We shall see this better by-and-by. To-day I must speak of something else—of the capacity for suffering, and what it marks. And I say ( that it is a high privilege to have capacity for suffering keenly, whether in the body, or in the intellect, or in the soul. I think my last lecture led to the threshold of this solemn truth, and must have brought you to suspect it. The most momentous gift made to man was the Divine Soul. Only less momentous was the gift of Reason. Each gift entails a responsibility, and with each responsibility lies a capacity for receiving pleasure of a high order in the right exercise of the gift, and exquisite pain in the wrong exercise of the gift. Every gift of God opens a sphere of happiness. The gift of life facultates the enjoyment of life. The amoeba lives, a drop of crystal jelly, and tastes in a dim elementary way the pleasure of existence in the running brook, attached to the green watercress. With the gift of sensation rises the dawn of a new day on animate nature. The first nerve is laid—the keel of a new life to be launched in the ocean of being—and it tingles with pleasur...« less