NewThoughtLibrary.com / DivineLibrary.org

and moral misery and degradation will probably continue until the lesson is learned. All cases of sickness, misery, evil, call for better self-comprehension. If there be one meaning which may be found in them all, it is, in one word, progress,--the effort of the Spirit to give us freedom. If we understood this, we should have a larger sympathy and charity for the whole human race, and be spared much suffering over the sins and crimes of others, and should look for the meaning, the Spirit, behind all wrong acts and all degraded lives.*

The great question, then, in all problems of suffering and evil, regarded from the point of view   of values and ideals, is this: What is God doing with us? What is the ideal toward which the   immanent Life is moving? All secondary questions reduce themselves to this; for everything goes to show that the universe is a system, an organism, an adjustment of means to ends for the benefit and development of the whole, inspired by one grand purpose. We did not make the world order. We cannot change it; and, if our life in it is full of misery, it is for us to discover how we make that misery, how we rebel, how we resist, and what the order means, in and through our lives.

If a nation is torn by internal troubles, by wars

*There are, of course, many other problems involved. The present discussion is devoted to an underlying interest.