fits which we derive from doing so. In the course of a normal human life, every civilised person has to perform that wearisome operation some twentyfive thousand times. But I have never met anyone who regards the matter as a religious difficulty. Troublesome as it is, its results are so obvious and so beneficial that it does not occur to us to isolate it. Or, again, suppose you pick up an important paper, and in a fit of absent-mindedness use it to light your pipe. When, a moment later, you realise what you have done, you are, I think, much more likely to say, "How stupid of me!" than to say "How mysteriously God has made the world. Fancy Him allowing an important paper to be destroyed just because I put it in the fire!" The properties of fire are so familiar that you cannot evolve a religious difficulty by isolating this single instance of its behaviour.

With the filling up of the gaps in our intellectual knowledge, the religious problem of suffering will, I believe, gradually disappear. And when, if ever, we have become as familiar with the mechanism of nature as we now are with the creeping of the flame towards the end of the lighted match, we shall find ourselves more inclined to regard suffering as

the consequence of folly than as the occasion for religious perplexity.

I must hasten to my conclusion. Almost all the pain and disaster that happen to men can be accounted for by the co-existence of three things: free-will, human solidarity, natural law. And each of the three is two-fold in its issue; each, while it leads to consequences which, like our having to undress in order to go to bed, wear a perplexing appearance if we are foolish enough to isolate them, is the indispensable condition of something which we would not at any cost be without. Free-will is the condition of virtue and moral character as well as of moral evil; the social character of life is the condition of mutual help as of mutual injury; natural law is the condition of the intelligibility of our experience, as well as of suffering. What are the alternatives, so far as our understanding can guide us? The alternative to that self-determination which makes moral evil possible would mean not a condition of virtue without the chance of sinning, but the replacing of persons by machines. The alternative to that solidarity which makes injury possible would mean not the ability to help without the ability to hurt, but the replacing of

social life, with its store of friendships and pleasures, by a stark and ghastly isolation. The alternative to that reign of law which makes pain possible would mean not an intelligible and happy life without suffering, but the replacing of order by chaos. If these alternatives were offered you, would you take them? Would you choose to become a machine, or to be isolated from your fellows, or to dwell in a disorderly world? I make bold to say that you would not.

And so it is not far-fetched to say that love is the key to suffering. There can be no love between machines, or those who are isolated from one another, or those who dwell where law is not. Freedom, society, order-all are wanted in order that love may come to be. Is love worth so tremendous a price? Will anyone dare-will anyone even desire -to answer "No"?

For nearly two thousand years Christian people have believed that "love" is the word which is least inadequate as the interpretation of God-the God who, as we said at the outset, is equally revealed in nature, in the organised life of men, and in the individual spirit. And here we have found these outstanding facts of life—in nature the fact of law,

among men the fact of solidarity, in the individual consciousness the fact of freedom-conspiring to produce the possibility of love in the world. It is a notable confirmation of our faith. We do not say that in the world as we know it there is nothing but love, but we say that the things which are evil or painful or sad exist as the price of those conditions without which love is not even conceivable. It is the mark of a miser to forget value and think only of cost. But the "kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is a merchant seeking goodly pearls: and having found one pearl of great price, he went and sold all that he had, and bought it."

If our experience-glad and sorrowful, grave and gay-thus finds its explanation in the fact of love, what is this but to say finally what we said at the beginning that the whole of our life is a revelation of the meaning of God, enabling us to rise at last to the joy of His friendship and the glory of His likeness? Love is creation's final law; for "God is love; and he that abideth in love abideth in God, and God abideth in him."

APPENDIX A

LANGUAGE VERSUS EXPERIENCE

MUCH of the objection that is felt to modern attempts to restate Christian doctrine would disappear at once if it were generally recognised that human language, whether spoken or written, is not and cannot be the starting-point of an inquiry about the past. It is commonly supposed that it is so, yet words by themselves are unintelligible apart from our experience of life.

This is true of even the ordinary intercourse of friends in daily conversation. We are apt thoughtlessly to assume that we understand what a man says to us because we speak a common language; but, however needful that may be, it would be no better than an unknown tongue if it were not for the background of a common experience which it implies. How does a child learn to talk? Not simply by adding new combinations of sounds to his vocabuulary, but by associating these new sounds with his