also to the strain and labour and suffering which attend it. But when we come a little further and take a sentence like this of Plato: 'Of sufferings and pains cometh help, for it is not possible by any other way to be ridded of our iniquity;'[1] then we get a higher strain, a strain like St. Peter's: 'He that hath suffered in the flesh hath ceased from sin;'[2] and we are brought to see, not only the necessity of the law of rule and suppression, not only the pain and suffering in it, but also its beneficence. And this positive sense of beneficence, salutariness, and hope, come out yet more strongly when Wordsworth says to Duty: 'Nor know we anything so fair as is the smile upon thy face;' or when Bishop Wilson says: 'They that deny themselves will be sure to find their strength increased, their affections raised, and their inward peace continually augmented;' and most of all, perhaps, when we hear from Goethe: 'Die and come to life! for so long as this is not accomplished thou art but a troubled guest upon an earth of gloom!'[3] But this is evidently borrowed from Jesus, and by one whose testimony is of all the more weight, because he certainly would not have become thus a borrower from Jesus, unless the truth had compelled him.
And never certainly was the joy, which in self-renouncement underlies the pain, so brought out as when Jesus boldly called the suppression of our first impulses and current thoughts: life, real life, eternal life. So that Jesus not only saw this great necessary truth of there being, as Aristotle says, in human nature a part to rule and a part to be ruled;
- ↑ Δἰ ἀλγηδόνων καὶ ὀδυνῶν γίγνεται ἡ ὠφέλεια, οὐ γὰρ οἶόν τε ἄλλως ἀδικίας ἀπαλλάττεσθαι.
- ↑ I Pet., iv, 1.
- ↑
- Stirb und verde!
- Denn, so lang du das nicht hast,
- Bist du nur ein trüber Gast
- Auf der dunkeln Erde!
- Stirb und verde!
