accordingly he let me out and turned back. Now, as I walked along the road, I was, of course, distinctly glad, not only that the men could go home to their families the sooner, but that it was my walking (and wearing out my shoes) that enabled them. Don't you see I must have felt this? that man is made to feel so; that in this (at least) his nature is shown; that if he had a larger life, it would be so with greater pains; that-here's the point-the true bigness of his life is measured by his pains?

"Let me tell you how I came to that last idea. It is another case of a 'least.' I was gathering peas in my garden, and, of course, in doing that one gets one's face scratched a little, and sundry small inconveniences, which, in fact, make the fun of doing it. Now, while thus employed, I thought-how could I help thinking of this very thing ?-it is our nature that the enjoyment of our life demands little inconveniences, exertions, small pains; these are the only things in which we rightly feel our life at all. If these be not there, existence becomes worthless or worse; success in putting them all away is fatal. So it is men engage in athletic sports, spend their holidays in climbing up mountains, find nothing so enjoyable as that which taxes their endurance and their energy.

"This is the way we are made, I say. It may or may not be a mystery or a paradox; it is a fact. Now this enjoyment in endurance is just according to the intensity of the life; the more physical vigour and balance, the more endurance can be made an element of satisfaction. A sick man can't stand it. The line of enjoyable suffering is not a fixed one; it fluctuates with the perfectness of the life. Now, don't you see the step I took? Is it not a perfect revelation? That our pains are, as they are, unen

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durable, awful, overwhelming, crushing, not to be borne save in mere misery and dumb impatience, which utter exhaustion alone makes patient, that our pains are thus unendurable, means not that they are too great, but that we are sick. We haven't got our proper life. Only think of this being our heritage, our proven nature and destiny, a life so intense and so large that it shall make all human pains the conditions of its exuberance! I see this in my heart so plainly, I long with quite a painful intensity to be able to make others see it with me. Do not you see it is the moral side of my idea of our being altruistic, having a consciousness co-extensive with humanity? . . . So you perceive pain is no more necessarily an evil, but an essential element of the highest good, felt as evil by want in us-partly want of knowledge, partly want of love. . . . Christ's life and death, which seems so separate from ours, so contrasted with it, is, in truth, the type and pattern of our own, is the revelation of it,of our life as well as of God's."

...

Speaking of our involuntary sacrifices, our unaccepted pains, Mr. Hinton once put it thus: Suppose, instead of Curtius, a slave, hating Rome, and cursing her with his last breath, had been bound hand and foot and thrown into the gulf to save the city. Yet suppose, in some future state of existence, that slave had come to see the part Rome was to play in the civilisation of the world, and was to say from his heart, "I am glad I was sacrificed for Rome," at once the involuntary sacrifice would be made his own, filling him with an infinite joy and satisfaction. So Mr. Hinton held that our most blankseeming woes, the pains and privations we have the most grudged as barren of all good, may have forward endsbe, in fact, so much stored-up force-and become the very material of the noblest joy when "the more life and

fuller" shall have revealed the true uses they serve in the redemption of the world.

But in tracing out what gave rise to Mr. Hinton's thoughts on pain, it must ever be borne in mind that the real source of inspiration, with regard not only to the "Mystery of Pain," but to so much of his highest and most helpful thinking, lay not in the secluded study or in quiet contact with nature, but in the back streets and slums of London. He was a man who emphatically dared to look upon the awful face of life, believing that it was the marred and thorn-crowned face of Love; believing that the evil phenomenon is ever to reveal a good reality behind it, which alone has actual existence; that, however black and meaningless it may look, it is the stained glass window seen from without, radiant with martyr and saint and divinest meaning when seen from within.

"I thank God," he exclaims in his MS. notes, “there is so much ugliness and evil, so many illusions, because each one of them is the voucher for a beautiful and good reality, as each illusion of the sense in science is evidence and voucher for some true scientific fact. I clasp evil and wrongness to my heart; they are life, they are God's tenderest love. He says to me in them, 'Look, my child, and tell me what I am doing; 'tis painful to you at first, but you will love it when you see it.' By faith, I see it even now, O my Father! and love it, though unseen, because thou doest it. . . . Blessed love of God! that by the evil of a phenomenon expels the deadly real evil that affects the spirit; loving ministers that come around with sharp swords to slay, not us, but the death that is within us."

CHAPTER IX.

THE following letters are to his friend Mr. Henry King, on a recent bereavement :

"Tottenham, July 30, 1860. "I have just received your letter, for which I very heartily thank you. If I had reflected I should perhaps have hesitated before touching so lightly a chord which vibrates in your heart so deeply, yet I can hardly regret doing that which has gained for me your letter and its profound expression of feelings which are common to all hearts, though perhaps experienced in all their intensity only by a few. I feel that an experience such as yours almost demands rather a reverent silence than an attempt to urge thoughts, which may be felt to be full of consolation by those whom Providence spares from the deepest affliction, and yet may be found to be quite powerless over the heart when really lacerated. I know how different a quiet contemplation, at our ease, of that which ought to comfort us in sorrow is from the feverish and unavailing effort to calm a present grief.

"And yet I cannot renounce the pleasure of trying to impart to you some thoughts which I have had bearing on the subject to which you refer, which I think are really adapted to soothe some causeless grief and remove forebodings which do injustice to God's bountiful

goodness. I shall try to avoid, in expressing to you my thoughts, what might seem like abstract speculation remote from human sympathies, and yet, if my language should seem to be of this kind, I know you will be able to understand that in my feeling, those speculative truths are the form under which the dearest and most human joys and sorrows, hopes and fears, and aspirations clothe themselves.

"I have thought on meditating on the future state, and the change which we cannot doubt will take place in our feelings and our very being even, in that higher state, that almost all which is capable of paining the heart or of seeming repulsive to that emotional nature which is the best and highest part of us, arises from a view which may be shown, even on admitted principles, to be a mistaken one. And that is, that conception that the difference between the heavenly state and ours depends, even in any part at all, upon the loss and taking away of anything we now possess. I think the difference consists wholly in an addition to our present faculties, leaving us therefore all that we now possess, all that we now feel,— all relations except sinful and evil ones that we have ever borne, all being as much as ever they were, only altered and placed in a different relation by added faculties and perceptions, to reduce them to the true position, cause them to be felt, not as realities, which they are not, but truly, as they are, phenomenal-the signs and evidences, nay, the very fact (as it is capable of being presented to certain faculties of ours), of a truer, higher, reality.

'May I use my own illustration to make clear my meaning? A being with sight only would feel mere appearances as realities; but when there was bestowed upon him the fulness of his faculties (as related to the phy