SUFFERING HUMAN AND DIVINE INTRODUCTION I KNEW when I asked Dr. H.
Wheeler Robinson to write this volume on Suffering that I was
giving him the most difficult task which this Series on Great
Issues of Life would impose on any writer in the list. The problem
of suffering was difficult enough in the days when the Book of Job
was written, when the Psalmists faced the hard issues of life, when
Milton tried to justify the ways of God, when Leibnitz sounded the
deeps and shallows of his philosophy. But we in these later times
have opened many new doors in the vast house of the universe we
have peered into hidden closets we have enlarged the area of knowl
edge, but at the same time we have widened the circumference of
mystery. The majestic order, the mathematical regularity, the
unvarying precision, the immensity of the spaces and the time-spans
convince our minds that this can not be a realm of chaos or
accident, but we are more than ever puzzled and brought to suspense
by the terrible list of pains and perils which beset what we are
prone to believe is the crowning work of creation, the topmost
being that has yet appeared. He is so well INTRODUCTION
constructed, so nobly provided for, so highly en dowed, so full of
longings and aspirations, so fitted for a world of a higher order
than the physical and biological sphere, why is he not given
greater security in his domain, why is he so beset with assaults
and threats, with agonies and suffering, why are there these swarms
of privileged microscopic enemies, why are there these hereditary
traits which menace him, why is there the long historical trail of
hindrances and frustration Professor W. Macneile Wilson, in his
Gifford Lec tures 1935-7, The Human Situation, has mar shalled the
facts of our human troubles and beset ments so impressively and, I
may say, so appallingly that no reader of his book can doubt that
it is no easy undertaking to heal the hurt of the human race, or to
justify mans trail of suffering, either from Nature or from
History. One item from Professor Wilsons book suggests trouble
enough to disturb our imagina tion and to give pause to our
optimism. There are, he says, seven hundred million sufferers from
malaria in the world, and that is only one of the woes that as
saults the human family. The author of this present book knows all
about this side of the story, and more too. He has written with his
eyes open on the whole picture. Sin is a darker mystery than
malaria and he must deal with INTRODUCTION that. He undertook his
task not lightly in ignorance, but seriously and bravely, knowing
the depth and difficulty of it. He saw clearly from the first that
there is no answer without coining to grips with the problem of a
time-order, and without facing the still deeper questions of the
nature of God and the mys terious fact of His suffering. The answer
is not from the outside, from Nature inward, but rather from the
inward discovery of Grace operating within us and beyond us, from
the reality of resources actually at hand that enable a person to
absorb pain and suffer ing without spoiling ones joy. The peace we
are seeking, this author tells us near the end of his book, is not
the peace of escape from the sufferings of life, but the peace of
victory won in their very midst and through their endurance. He
finds an allegory in the ritual of the Temple in Jerusalem It was
the duty of a solitary priest to go inthe darkness into the inner
enclosure of the altar to clear away the ashes of the fire which
was kept continually burning. It was the rule that none went with
him and he carried no lamp, but he walked in the light of the altar
fire My thought is that every man who goes on doing his duty in the
darkness of suffering will be walking by the light of some altar
fire, though none but himself may know of it, and perhaps not he
himself...
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