as having caused this or that special physical discomfort—­which may indeed have originated with some ancestor; but evil in ourselves is the cause of its continuance, the source of its necessity, and the preventive of that patience which would soon take from it, or at least blunt its sting.  The evil is essentially unnecessary, and passes with the attainment of the object for which it is permitted—­namely, the development of pure will in man; the suffering also is essentially unnecessary, but while the evil lasts, the suffering, whether consequent or merely concomitant, is absolutely necessary.  Foolish is the man, and there are many such men, who would rid himself or his fellows of discomfort by setting the world right, by waging war on the evils around him, while he neglects that integral part of the world where lies his business, his first business—­namely, his own character and conduct.  Were it possible—­an absurd supposition—­that the world should thus be righted from the outside, it would yet be impossible for the man who had contributed to the work, remaining what he was, ever to enjoy the perfection of the result; himself not in tune with the organ he had tuned, he must imagine it still a distracted, jarring instrument.  The philanthropist who regards the wrong as in the race, forgetting that the race is made up of conscious and wrong individuals, forgets also that wrong is always generated in and done by an individual; that the wrongness exists in the individual, and by him is passed over, as tendency, to the race; and that no evil can be cured in the race, except by its being cured in its individuals:  tendency is not absolute evil; it is there that it may be resisted, not yielded to.  There is no way of making three men right but by making right each one of the three; but a cure in one man who repents and turns, is a beginning of the cure of the whole human race.

Even if a man’s suffering be a far inheritance, for the curing of which by faith and obedience this life would not be sufficiently long, faith and obedience will yet render it endurable to the man, and overflow in help to his fellow-sufferers.  The groaning body, wrapt in the garment of hope, will, with outstretched neck, look for its redemption, and endure.

The one cure for any organism, is to be set right—­to have all its parts brought into harmony with each other; the one comfort is to know this cure in process.  Rightness alone is cure.  The return of the organism to its true self, is its only possible ease.  To free a man from suffering, he must be set right, put in health; and the health at the root of man’s being, his rightness, is to be free from wrongness, that is, from sin.  A man is right when there is no wrong in him.  The wrong, the evil is in him; he must be set free from it.  I do not mean set free from the sins he has done:  that will follow; I mean the sins he is doing, or is capable of doing; the sins in his being which spoil his nature—­the wrongness in him—­the evil he consents to; the sin he is, which makes him do the sin he does.