"Yes—and the struggle with death, for the next few weeks, must involve incessant suffering...frightful suffering...perhaps vainly...."
"I feared so," he murmured, his kind face paling.
"Then why do you thank heaven that modern science has found such wonderful ways of prolonging life?"
He raised his head with a start and their eyes met. He saw that the nurse's face was pale and calm—almost judicial in its composure—and his self-possession returned to him.
"As a Christian," he answered, with his slow smile, "I can hardly do otherwise."
Justine continued to consider him thoughtfully. "The men of the older generation—clergymen, I mean," she went on in a low controlled voice, "would of course take that view—must take it. But the conditions are so changed—so many undreamed-of means of prolonging life—prolonging suffering—have been discovered and applied in the last few years, that I wondered...in my profession one often wonders...."
"I understand," he rejoined sympathetically, forgetting his youth and his inexperience in the simple desire to bring solace to a troubled mind. "I understand your feeling—but you need have no doubt. Human life is sacred, and the fact that, even in this materialistic age, science is continually struggling to preserve and prolong it, shows—very beautifully, I think—how all things work together to fulfill the divine will."
"Then you believe that the divine will delights in mere pain—mere meaningless animal suffering—for its own sake?"
"Surely not; but for the sake of the spiritual life that may be mysteriously wrung out of it."
Justine bent her puzzled brows on him. "I could understand that view of moral suffering—or even of physical pain moderate enough to leave the mind clear, and to call forth qualities of endurance and renunciation. But where the body has been crushed to a pulp, and the mind is no more than a machine for the registering of sense-impressions of physical anguish, of what use can such suffering be to its owner—or to the divine will?"