each has to answer tor himself.  For myself, I can only say that strength is sometimes given, sometimes denied.  How foolish to be anxious!  Yes, but how inevitable!  If the beauty and the joy of the world gave one assurance in dark hours that all was certainly well, the pilgrimage would be an easy one.  But can one be optimistic by resolving to be?  One can of course control oneself, one can let no murmur of pain escape one, one can even enunciate deep and courageous maxims, because one would not trouble the peace of others, waiting patiently till the golden mood returns.  But what if the desolate conviction forces itself upon the mind that sorrow is the truer thing?  What if one tests one’s own experience, and sees that, under the pressure of sorrow, one after another of the world’s lights are extinguished, health, and peace, and beauty, and delight, till one asks oneself whether sorrow is not perhaps the truest and most actual thing of all?  That is the ghastliest of moments, when everything drops from us but fear and horror, when we think that we have indeed found truth at last, and that the answer to Pilate’s bitter question is that pain is the nearest thing to truth because it is the strongest.  If I felt that, says the reluctant heart, I should abandon myself to despair.  No, says sterner reason, you would bear it because you cannot escape from it.  Into whatever depths of despair you fell, you would still be upheld by the law that bids you be.

Where, then, is the hope to be found?  It is here.  One is tempted to think of God through human analogies and symbols.  We think of Him as of a potter moulding the clay to his will; as of a statesman that sways a state; as of an artist that traces a fair design.  But all similitudes and comparisons break down, for no man can create anything; he can but modify matter to his ends, and when he fails, it is because of some natural law that cuts across his design and thwarts him relentlessly.  But the essence of God’s omnipotence is that both law and matter are His and originate from Him; so that, if a single fibre of what we know to be evil can be found in the world, either God is responsible for that, or He is dealing with something He did not originate and cannot overcome.  Nothing can extricate us from this dilemma, except the belief that what we think evil is not really evil at all, but hidden good; and thus we have firm ground under our feet at last, and can begin to climb out of the abyss.  And then we feel in our own hearts how indomitable is our sense of our right to happiness, how unconquerable our hope; how swiftly we forget unhappiness; how firmly we remember joy; and then we see that the one absolutely permanent and vital power in the world is the power of love, which wins victories over every evil we can name; and if it is so plain that love is the one essential and triumphant force in the world, it must be the very heartbeat of God; till we feel that when soon or late the day comes for us, when our swimming eyes discern ever more faintly the awestruck pitying faces round us, and the senses give up their powers one by one, and the tides of death creep on us, and the daylight dies—­that even so we shall find that love awaiting us in the region to which the noblest and bravest and purest, as well as the vilest and most timid and most soiled have gone.