What sorrow is deeper than the full recognition of one's own now irrevocable deed, if one has, hereupon, fully to confess that this deed is, from one's own present point of view, a crime? Yet how could such ills be simply removed from existence if any range of individual expression, of freedom, of power to choose is to be left open at all? How can one possess spiritual effectiveness--the privilege that youth most ardently demands--without assuming the risk involved in taking personal responsibility for some aspects of the lives of our fellows? As for our blunders, what more precious privilege do we all claim than the privilege of making our own blunders, or at least a due proportion of them? When we act, every act is done for eternity, since it is irrevocable. When we love, we ask the privilege to bind up other destinies with our own. The tragedies of such a world as ours are, therefore, not such as could be simply wiped out of existence, unless one were ready to deprive every individual personality both of its range of free choice and of its effectiveness of action. When we suffer, then, in such a world, we know indeed that there need have been no such suffering had there been no world at all. But precisely when our ills are most bound up with [{252}] our own personal wills, we know that no mere removal of such ills could have occurred without the abolition of all the conditions which our spiritual freedom, our longing for effectiveness, and our love for union with other personalities make us regard as the conditions of the highest good. No God could conceivably give you the good of self-expression without granting you the privilege, not only of choosing wrongly, but of involving your brethren in the results of your misdeed. For when you love your kind, you aim to be a factor in their lives; and to deprive you of this privilege would be to insure your total failure. But if you possess this privilege, you share in a life that, in proportion to its importance and depth and range and richness of spiritual relations, is full of the possibilities of tragedy.
Face such tragedy, however, and what does it show you? The possibility, not of annulling an evil, or of ceasing to regret it, but of showing spiritual power, first, through idealising your grief, by seeing even through this grief the depth of the significance of our relations as individuals to one another, to our social order, and to the whole of life; secondly, through enduring your fortune; and thirdly, through conquering, by the might of the spirit, those goods which can only be won through such sorrow. What those goods are, the convict has just, if only in small part, told us. Griselda told us something about them which is much deeper still. For adversity and loyalty are, indeed, simply inseparable [{253}] companions. There could not be loyalty in a world where the loyal being himself met no adversities that personally belonged to and entered his own inner life. That this is true, let every loyal experience bear witness.
Now such sorrows, such idealised evils, which are so interwoven with good that if the precious grief were wholly removed from existence, the courage, the fidelity, the spiritual self-possession, the peace through and in and beyond tribulation which such trials alone make possible, would also be removed--they surely show us that the abstract principle: "Evil ought to be abolished," is false. They show us that the divine will also must be made perfect through suffering. Since we can comprehend the meaning of such experiences only through resolute action, through courage, through loyalty, through the power of the spirit, they in no wise justify sloth, or mere passivity, or mystical idleness. The active dealing with such sorrow gives, as James himself once well asserts, a new dimension to life. No experiences go further than do these to show us how, in our loyalty and in our courage, we are becoming one with the master of life, who through sorrow overcomes.
Let man, the destroyer, then remember that there is one ill which he could not destroy, even if he were God, without also destroying all the spiritual prowess in which all those rejoice who, inspired by an ambition infinitely above that of Achilles, long [{254}] to be one with God through bearing and overcoming the sorrows of a world.
We have thus indicated a source of insight. To tell more about what it reveals would at once lead me, as you see, close to the most vital of all Christian teachings, the doctrine of the Atonement. But such a study belongs elsewhere.