hypocrisy.  The strength of Calvinism is its horrible resemblance to a natural inference from the facts of life; but if any sort of Calvinism is true, then it is a mere insult to the intelligence to say that God is loving or just.  The real basis for all deep-seated fear about life is the fear that one will not be dealt with either lovingly or justly.  But we have to make a simple choice as to what we will believe, and the only hope is to believe that immediate harshness and injustice is not ultimately inconsistent with Love.  No one who knows anything of the world and of life can pretend to think or say that suffering always results from, or is at all proportioned to, moral faults; and if we are tempted to regard all our disasters as penal consequences, then we are tempted to endure them with gloomy and morbid immobility.

It is far more wholesome and encouraging to look upon many disasters that befall us as opportunities to show a little spirit, to evoke the courage which does not come by indolent prosperity, to increase our sympathy, to enlarge our experience, to make things clearer to us, to develop our mind and heart, to free us from material temptations.  Past suffering is not always an evil, it is often an exciting reminiscence.  It is good to take life adventurously, like Odysseus of old.  What would one feel about Odysseus if, instead of contriving a way out of the Cyclops’ cave, he had set himself to consider of what forgotten sin his danger was the consequence?  Suffering and disaster come to us to develop our inventiveness and our courage, not to daunt and dismay us; and we ought therefore to approach experience with a sense of humour, if possible, and with a lively curiosity.  I recollect hearing a man the other day describing an operation to which he had been subjected.  “My word,” he said, his eyes sparkling with delight at the recollection, “that was awful, when I came into the operating-room, and saw the surgeons in their togs, and the pails and basins all about, and was invited to step up to the table!” There is nothing so agreeable as the remembrance of fears through which we have passed; and we can only learn to despise them by finding out how unbalanced they were.

I do not mean that fears can ever be pleasant at the time, but we do them too much honour if we court them and defer to them.  However much we may be tortured by them, there is always something at the back of our mind which despises our own susceptibility to them; and it is that deeper instinct which we ought to trust.

But we cannot even begin to trust it, as long as we allow ourselves to believe pietistically that the Mind of God is set on punishment.  That is the ghastly error which humanity tends to make.  It has been dinned into us, alas, from our early years, and religious phraseology is constantly polluted by it.  Our Saviour lent no countenance to this at all; He spoke perfectly plainly against the theory of “judgments.”  Of course suffering