356 AROUND AN OLD HOMESTEAD. 



the individuals themselves? How else lies their recom- 

 pense? And shall we say also of the world of the 

 lower animals and the rest of Nature that their pain is, 

 too, but a vicarious suffering? To say that sorrow 

 brings with it a greater good than would, or could, 

 exist without it is all well enough as a theory, and may 

 be true in some cases, but I can not accept it as a uni- 

 versal fact, applicable alike to all individuals. No, I 

 find life otherwise. I am confronted with the evidences 

 of genuine and implacable suffering in all the world of 

 Nature. I simply have bravely to admit its existence, 

 and to acknowledge that the presence of pain in the uni- 

 verse is an ineffaceable reality and an ever-returning, 

 baffling mystery — in itself a source of pain. 



James Hinton's book, "The Mystery of Pain," has 

 been of much help to me. It is, indeed, "a book for 

 the sorrowful." His argument seems to me at times 

 to be somewhat vitiated by his apparent refusal to rec- 

 ognize the absolute reality of pain in an attempt to ex- 

 plain it away by showing that individual good comes 

 from it, which is by no means universally the case, in 

 the life that now is. The joy of sacrifice may under 

 the circumstances be in many instances the best possible 

 compensation for the undergoing of pain (and it is 

 surely in that spirit that, when necessary, we should 

 meet it), but it is not a substitute for the happiness of 

 innocence; the sting remains, and the memory of evil. 

 Schopenhauer was right at least in this, that he recog- 

 nized the undeniable reality of evil as evil, and had per- 

 haps more than any other philosopher an insight into 

 its nature. 



The only adequate explanation that I have to offer 



