But in these early days of seclusion the lonely patient has opportunity for much thinking. Lying in bed in a room which, as a recent writer described it, is richly decorated with a white ceiling, four white walls, a door, a window and a floor, he has indeed time for thought and for thought without distraction.
Surrounded as he is by the sick and the maimed, perhaps one of the first subjects on which he is led to ponder is the mystery of Pain. What does it all mean that a God otherwise beneficent should impose on the creatures he has brought into the world illness and suffering? Even Prince Siddartha wondered at it:
"Since if, all powerful, he leaves it so,
He is not good; and if not powerful,
He is not God?"
In better mood the patient may wonder whether his personal share of pain is in any sense a penance or atonement for his own past sins. This is a thought which is natural and acceptable perhaps to most minds. But the Saints and Martyrs testifying to their faith went farther and not only submitted to but gladly sought pain and suffering. Now pain and agony well endured undoubtedly strengthen character. Have we not a vivid example of this before us in the catastrophe of the European war; a war which is saved from being wholly evil and dreadful because out of it has come the spiritual regeneration of the allied nations who are engulfed in it? Still it can hardly be expected that ordinary flesh and blood should in this world, so full of love and beauty, invite and seek out suffering and disaster even in order to bear them bravely. Enough for most of us that if doomed to walk with them we
"Turn the necessity to glorious gain."
But all the same it must be a happy thing for a sufferer if he can hope with the Martyrs that pain borne with fortitude may be offered as a sacrifice and atonement.
In these dull and lonely moments also one inevitably asks whether it is true that people exist who are stolid to pain? One may consecrate it before it comes and after it goes, but to most of us feeble folk pain when present occupies the whole limelight and leaves the rest of the stage in darkness! The only inmate of the hospital who stirred my temper was a patient who on making a rapid recovery from what he described as a very severe operation said he had refused ether and did not mind pain. I regained my equanimity when an orderly confided to me that the operation had been slight!
In health one is apt to think that Love is the great motive power of humanity. In illness and suffering Pain seems the great and pressing problem. They often go hand in hand and perhaps it is true that without them both life has not rendered its full wealth or its perfect discipline. "The ennobling depths of pain" need also "the purifying fire of love" to round out a perfect character.
"Incomprehensibly Love's will doth move
Through this blind world in ways we cannot see,
Death giving birth to life. So does deep sorrow
Give birth to rarer joy on some glad morrow."
These and many such questions can be as solemn, as perplexing and as engrossing as any that exercised the inmates of the Monastery to which we here find so much resemblance. As a contrast to such heart-searching thoughts the patient can wonder at the properties of that radium by which he may have been treated. How astonishing is it that this atom of matter should constantly emit rays which search out and destroy evil tissues and leave unharmed the good; and that they do this without any perceptible diminution of energy! How contrary this is to all we have hitherto known of the conservation of energy and of the impossibility of obtaining perpetual motion or continued power! What is so contrary to our preconceived ideas proves itself, however, by experience efficient in an almost supernatural or miraculous manner. Perhaps fatigued by these thoughts the patient can turn from them and closing his eyes begin to count "The flock of sheep that leisurely pass by one after one" and by happy chance submit himself to sleep.