He must know, then, that evil and suffering are not temporary elements of man’s evolution, just about to be eliminated by the new reform, the last formula, the fresh panacea.  To those who have tasted grief and smelt the fire such easy preaching and such confident solutions are a grave offense.  They know that evil is an integral part of our universe; suffering an enduring element of the whole.  So he must preach upon the chances and changes of this mortal world, or go to the house of shame or the place of mourning, knowing that there is something past finding out in evil, something incommunicable about true sorrow.  They are not external things, alien to our natures, that happen one day from without, and may perhaps be avoided, and by and by are gone.  No; that which makes sorrow, sorrow, and evil, evil, is their naturalness; they well up from within, part of the very texture of our consciousness.  He knows you can never express them, for truly to do that you would have to express and explain the entire world.  It is not easy then to interpret the evil and suffering which are not external and temporary, but enduring and a part of the whole.

So the preacher is never dealing with plain or uncomplicated matters.  It is his business to perceive the mystery of iniquity in the saint and to recognize the mystery of godliness in the sinner.  It is his business to revere the child and yet watch him that he may make a man of him.  He must say, so as to be understood, to those who balk at discipline, and rail at self-repression, and resent pain:  you have not yet begun to live nor made the first step toward understanding the universe and yourselves.  To avoid discipline and to blench at pain is to evade life.  There are limitations, occasioned by the evil and the suffering of the world, in whose repressions men find fulfillment.  When you are honest with yourself you will know what Dante meant when he said: 

  “And thou shalt see those who
  Contented are within the fire;
  Because they hope to come,
  When e’er it may be, to the blessed people."[1]

It is his business, also, to be the comrade of his peers, and yet speak to them the truth in love; his task to understand the bitterness and assuage the sorrows of old age.  I suppose the greatest influence a preacher ever exercises, and a chief source of the material and insight of his preaching, is found in this intimate contact with living and suffering, divided and distracted men and women.  When strong men blench with pain and exquisite grief stirs within us at the sight and we can endure naught else but to suffer with them, when youth is blurred with sin, and gray heads are sick with shame and we, then, want to die and cry, O God! forgive and save them or else blot me out of Thy book of life—­for who could bear to live in a world where such things are the end!—­then, through the society of sorrow, and the holy comradeship in shame, we begin to find the Lord and to understand both the kindness and the