SUFFERING HUMAN AND DIVINE INTRODUCTION I KNEW when I asked Dr. H. Wheeler Robinson to write this volume on Suffering that I was giving him the most difficult task which this Series on Great Issues of Life would impose on any writer in the list. The problem of suffering was difficult enough in the days when the Book of Job was written, when the Psalmists faced the hard issues of life, when Milton tried to justify the ways of God, when Leibnitz sounded the deeps and shallows of his philosophy. But we in these later times have opened many new doors in the vast house of the universe we have peered into hidden closets we have enlarged the area of knowl edge, but at the same time we have widened the circumference of mystery. The majestic order, the mathematical regularity, the unvarying precision, the immensity of the spaces and the time-spans convince our minds that this can not be a realm of chaos or accident, but we are more than ever puzzled and brought to suspense by the terrible list of pains and perils which beset what we are prone to believe is the crowning work of creation, the topmost being that has yet appeared. He is so well INTRODUCTION constructed, so nobly provided for, so highly en dowed, so full of longings and aspirations, so fitted for a world of a higher order than the physical and biological sphere, why is he not given greater security in his domain, why is he so beset with assaults and threats, with agonies and suffering, why are there these swarms of privileged microscopic enemies, why are there these hereditary traits which menace him, why is there the long historical trail of hindrances and frustration Professor W. Macneile Wilson, in his Gifford Lec tures 1935-7, The Human Situation, has mar shalled the facts of our human troubles and beset ments so impressively and, I may say, so appallingly that no reader of his book can doubt that it is no easy undertaking to heal the hurt of the human race, or to justify mans trail of suffering, either from Nature or from History. One item from Professor Wilsons book suggests trouble enough to disturb our imagina tion and to give pause to our optimism. There are, he says, seven hundred million sufferers from malaria in the world, and that is only one of the woes that as saults the human family. The author of this present book knows all about this side of the story, and more too. He has written with his eyes open on the whole picture. Sin is a darker mystery than malaria and he must deal with INTRODUCTION that. He undertook his task not lightly in ignorance, but seriously and bravely, knowing the depth and difficulty of it. He saw clearly from the first that there is no answer without coining to grips with the problem of a time-order, and without facing the still deeper questions of the nature of God and the mys terious fact of His suffering. The answer is not from the outside, from Nature inward, but rather from the inward discovery of Grace operating within us and beyond us, from the reality of resources actually at hand that enable a person to absorb pain and suffer ing without spoiling ones joy. The peace we are seeking, this author tells us near the end of his book, is not the peace of escape from the sufferings of life, but the peace of victory won in their very midst and through their endurance. He finds an allegory in the ritual of the Temple in Jerusalem It was the duty of a solitary priest to go inthe darkness into the inner enclosure of the altar to clear away the ashes of the fire which was kept continually burning. It was the rule that none went with him and he carried no lamp, but he walked in the light of the altar fire My thought is that every man who goes on doing his duty in the darkness of suffering will be walking by the light of some altar fire, though none but himself may know of it, and perhaps not he himself...