July 8, 1891.
I was in town last week for a few days on some necessary business, staying with old friends. Two or three people came in to dine one night, and afterwards, I hardly know how, I found myself talking with a curious openness to one of the guests, a woman whom I only slightly knew. She is a very able and cultivated woman indeed, and it was a surprise to her friends when she lately became a Christian Scientist. When I have met her before, I have thought her a curiously guarded personality, appearing to live a secret and absorbing life of her own, impenetrable, and holding up a shield of conventionality against the world. To-night she laid down her shield, and I saw the beating of a very pure and loving heart. The text of her talk was that we should never allow ourselves to believe in our limitations, because they did not really exist. I found her, to my surprise, intensely emotional, with a passionate disbelief in and yet pity for all sorrow and suffering. She appealed to me to take up Christian Science—"not to read or talk about it," she said; "that is no use: it is a life, not a theory; just accept it, and live by it, and you will find it true."
But there is one part of me that rebels against the whole idea of Christian Science—my reason. I found, or thought I found, this woman to be wise both in head and heart, but not wise in mind. It seems to me that pain and sorrow and suffering are phenomena, just as real as other phenomena; and that one does no good by denying them, but only by accepting them, and living in them and through them. One might as truly, it seems, take upon oneself to deny that there was any such colour as red in the world, and tell people that whenever they saw or discerned any tinge of red, it was a delusion; one can only use one's faculty of perception; and if sorrow and suffering are a delusion, how do I know that love and joy are not delusions too? They must stand and fall together. The reason why I believe that joy and love will in the end triumph, is because I have, because we all have, an instinctive desire for them, and a no less instinctive fear and dread of pain and sorrow. We may, indeed I believe with all my heart that we shall, emerge from them, but they are no less assuredly there. We triumph over them, when we learn to live bravely and courageously in them, when we do not seek to evade them or to hasten incredulously away from them. We fail, if we spend our time in repining, in regretting, in wishing the sweet and tranquil hours of untroubled joy back. We are not strong enough to desire the cup of suffering, even though we may know that we must drink it before we can discern the truth. But we may rejoice with a deep-seated joy, in the dark hours, that the Hand of God is heavy upon us. When our vital energies flag, when what we thought were our effective powers languish and grow faint, then we may be glad because the Father is showing us His Will; and then our sorrow is a fruitful sorrow, and labours, as the swelling seed labours in the sombre earth to thrust her slender hands up to the sun and air. . . .
We two sate long in a corner of the quiet lamp-lit room, talking like old friends—once or twice our conversation was suspended by music, which fell like dew upon my parched heart; and though I could not accept my fellow-pilgrim's thought, I could see in the glance of her eyes, full of pity and wonder, that we were indeed faring along the same strange road to the paradise of God. It did me good, that talk; it helped me with a sense of sweet and tender fellowship; and I had no doubt that God was teaching my friend in His own fatherly way, even as He was teaching me, and all of us.