The Birmingham age-herald., 1910-09-15
From the Washington Herald.

From the Washington Herald
 TN this materiaE-tic age very many of
 us are prone to think that sorrow and A pain are unmitigated evils in the world; serving no useful end; simply add ing to the sum of human misery. Rich ard Steele, in one of his Spectator essays, had some thing to say on this head:
 Ut is a very melancholy reflection that men are usually so weak that it is absolutely necessary for them to know sorrow and pain to be in their right senses. Prosperous people dor happy there are none) are hurried away with fond sense of their present condi- ton, and thoughtless of the mutabillty of fortune.'
 Few of us will go so far with the es- sayist as to say that there are no happy men. Mir Steele himself. as we see him in his works and read about his life, seems, in spite of some debt and duns, to have been tolerably happy. But we can all agree with him when he says that sorrow and pain are by no means evils for 1t Is, indeed, through such aids as these that man comes truly to know himself. his own limitations, his own powers. Horace Bushnell wrote: ----
 And so 1t is that by this fact of pain we arrive at the only sufficient discov- cry of the goodness of God. He could not be more tenderly close to us or more adorably great than He is in this most earnest way of fidelity. Thus it Is that a great many of the best and holiest ex- amples of piety are such as have been tried and finished in the crucible of suf- ferlng''
 It was in something of the same thought and spirit that Whittier wrote "Over the crucible of pain
 Watches the tender eye of love,
 The slow transmitting of the chain
 Whose links are iron below, to gold
 aboye."
 It is only to the thoughtless man that these things-pain and sorrow-seem to be unmitigated ills, grumblingly to be endured. It was through his sufferings that Job came to be the man he was at last and in all literature we have no such other example of continual growing and kicking against the bricks. In his Journal Amiel wrote:
 "So long as Job murmurs and as Prov idence is thought to be too severe, so long as there is any inner protestation against fate, or doubt as to the per feet justice of God. there is not entire humility or sincere repentance. It is when we accept the expiation that 1t can be spared us; 1t is when we submit sincerely that grace may be granted us. Only when grief finds its work done can God dispense us from It." The chief antidote against sorrow Is employment. and the true philosopher is he who can perceive that sorrow sent to him driving him to busy-ness was, in spite of his first resentful thoughts, a blessing in disguise. Sorrow, we believe, comes oftenest and hardest to the soul that is still and practically dead in life. as stagnation comes to the sheltered pool unruffled by the winds, unmoved by ebb and flow. Byron wrote: Borrow preys upon Its solitude. and nothing more diverts it From its sad visions of the other world Than calling 1t at moments back to this;
 The busy have no time for tears" We people of this workaday world must leave to the poets and dreamers. the sen- privilege of crying
 But, oh, for the touch of vanished hand
  And the sound of voice that is still" We have no time for signing; tpe hours are too short and too precious, while there | is work to be done in the world, for in- dulging in emotional regrets. We need. 1 to armor our souls against the fears and terrors of what may chance to befall: we need to look happily forward, not back; to leave signing and set about the work we have to do in the world; to do it hon. estlY in faith and in hope and trust in God for the. rest.
 "Tully tells us a story after Pompey which gives us good taste of the pleas ant manner the men of wit and philos- ophy had in the olden time of allievat- ing the distresses of life by the force of reason and philosophy. Pompey. when hc came to Rhodes, had a curiosity to visit the famous philosopher, Posidonius, but. finding him In sick bed. he be- walled his misfortune that he should not hear a discourse from him. But you may, answered Posidonius: and immedi- ately entered into the point of Stoical philosophy which says pain Is not an evil During the discourse, upon every pupcture> he felt from his distemper he smiled and cried out: 'Painl Pain Be as 'impertinent and as troublesome as you