gues in his Posthumous Essays' that if God desired all His creatures to be virtuous, He would have made them so, had His power been sufficiently great. As you are aware, Mill denied the freedom of will, and this denial leads him here, as elsewhere, to use words which are absolutely destitute of meaning. The expression,

making a man virtuous," is a contradiction in terms. God cannot make a man virtuous; and the fact that He cannot do so argues no more limitation of His power, than does the fact that He cannot act wrongly or inconsistently with His own nature. A being can be compelled, of course, to refrain from evil, but if he be so compelled, there is no moral value in his refraining. Compelling him therefore to refrain from evil is not compelling him to be virtuous. A virtuous character cannot be bestowed on a man by a creative fiat from without; it must be the outcome of his own free will within. Hence, what Mill, in the same connection, speaks of as such an inexplicable mystery, becomes quite simple if we recognise human freedom. It is possible for a man "to produce, by a succession of efforts, what God himself had no other means of creating," to produce, namely, a good character. Be ye holy," we read, not "suffer

ourselves to be made holy." If we are to be holy at all, it can only be by a succession of voluntary efforts.

Liability to evil, then, is inevitably involved in the possibility of goodness, which must be the result of choice. A forced goodness is a contradiction in terms. There is no difference in moral value between constrained obedience and free disobedience. Hence responsibility for evil rests not with God, but simply and solely with the free agents who have sinned. A good God must have been under the necessity, so to speak, of creating beings capable of goodness. Such beings must be free. When once they were created, it was not for God, but for them, to decide whether there should be evil in the world or no. they have decided that there should. But even so, a world without any human goodness in it, without any noble Christlike men and women, would have been infinitely inferior to our own, in spite of all its wickedness. The goodness of one righteous man will compensate for the wickedness of many wicked. Sodom, we are told, would have been spared for the sake of ten good men ; Jerusalem for the sake of one. So that, since much evil can be compensated for by a little good, since the prevention of evil would have

Alas!

been the prevention of good,-since evil, according to the testimony of history, is necessarily involved in good, as shadows are the invariable accompaniments of light, it is as absurd to wish that evil had been prevented as to try and do away with light for the sake of getting rid of shadows.

13

The Mystery of Suffering.

I.

"It became Him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the Captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings."-HEBREWS ii. 10.

IN N this sermon I shall endeavour to show you in the abstract that perfection of character can only be brought about by means of suffering. In the two following sermons, I shall ask you to notice how the sufferings of Christ tended to His perfection; and in a fourth I shall take a bird's eye view of the whole subject, and notice some remaining difficulties.

We have got used to the phrase " Perfect through sufferings," but how strange it would appear to any one who read it for the first time. "Perfect through sufferings!" he would say; "surely the writer has made a mistake. He must mean, perfect through joy. Suffering can

only make men imperfect." The atheist points to the groans and anguish of universal nature, and says, "Look there! how can there be a loving God when all this misery is allowedmisery which must be at once the sign and the cause of imperfection?" And I am sorry to say there have been a great many theologians who have represented suffering as a sort of vindictive retaliation on the part of God, to compensate Himself for the fall of Adam. I need not tell you, I hope, that this latter view is quite as incompatible as the atheistic with Christ's doctrine of the Fatherhood of God. Let us see, now, if we cannot reach some conclusions more satisfactory than these. Let us see if it is not possible for reason to discover a necessity, usefulness and a blessedness, in suffering. If I can show that it is necessary for the perfecting of character, then, since a perfect character is the best of all possessions, I shall have proved that suffering is our greatest blessing and our kindest friend. Let us look into this matter a little.

In the first place, suffering acts as a check upon our evil tendencies. Here we may be met with the objection that if God had not allowed