For, if men are responsible to a certain extent for their own suffering and disease of mind and body; if payment in their own persons is exacted as a just result of ignorance, or as the punishment of abuse of knowledge; yet the consequences of thought and action are not thereby entirely arrested. Life is a Whole, and the conduct of the members of the spiritual Communion of Love must affect the Whole for evil or good. By our willing acceptance of our suffering as the transmuting agent for the conversion of the effects of ignorance and of active evil into elements of recreated good; by our endeavours to add to the world's accumulating consciousness of the Love of God by means of our own rightly directed thought and action; by our readiness to suffer in ourselves the physical and psychical effects of evil, and translate them into good, may we not prove ourselves more worthy of our high vocation to the Communion of Love?
IN the foregoing pages has been set forward some attempt to explain how the transmuting action of the creed of optimistic suffering operates in a progressive revelation of the spiritual unity of the Whole of Life, whereby pain appears as the agent of the Will of a God of Love in the conversion of evil into good, and whereby the perfecting consciousness of Creation may be drawn into willing co-operation with the Creator.
Such an interpretation of the presence of evil and pain in the world is in agreement with that advanced by Science in support of the supposition that evolutionary growth entails the susceptibility of organisms to contrasting sensations. But is it also compatible with that other explanation of the origin of evil which holds the sin of Adam accountable for the suffering of the whole world, and upon which is based the ecclesiastical doctrine of the need of the Christian Atonement?
While affirming the interdependence of sin and suffering, there is drawn a careful distinction between the two, observation of which is necessary by the man who would avail himself of the Church's aid in the salvation of his soul. Supported as allegorical truth, if not as actual historical occurrences, the Hebrew legends of the Creation and the Fall have been adopted as an explanatory foundation for the need of a new covenant between man, whose sinful conduct marred an originally perfect world, and his justly offended Deity.