The mystery of pain : a book for the sorrowful / by James Hinton.

  • James Hinton
Date:
1872
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The mystery of pain : a book for the sorrowful / by James Hinton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    God has meant us for, the happiness to which human nature is fitted, to which it should aspire? Should it be that from which the painful is banished, or that in which pain is latent? Should pain be merely absent, or swallowed up in love and turned to joy ? Surely we can answer but in one way. To wish the former were to choose the lesser good, to cut ourselves off from our chief preroga- tive. If God truly loved man, must He not have made him such, that by want of love pain should arise ; and that to him—ignorant and unloving as he is—the world should be one dark mystery of sorrow ? How else should He have made us capable of joy, how else have made earth tolerable in the eyes of hea- ven ?—in the eyes of that heaven which gazes on the Lamb that has been slain, and sees, un- amazed, in Him the brightness of the Father’s glory, the express image of His person. For if in the only worthy joy (the only hap- piness which, matching the dignity of man or filling his capacity, rightly deserves the name of human,) if in this there is necessarily latent the element of pain, so that by an absence it