"Oh, Willie, how can you ask?" she sobbed. Willie put his arm about her in a way that foreshadowed that he had chosen her to be his for ever. Mrs. Kissack made the Callows comfortable for the night, and then neighbours went home cheerfully to bed. But through the whole of that stormy night, and through the long wet hours of the dawn Maggie Kinrade lay in great pain in the blackened heather. When time had made the hillside green again with young gorse and bracken, the lesson Maggie Kinrade had learned was as fresh as ever in her mind. The chain of events that had followed in the train of her "whispering" against Willie was too trying to be easily forgotten. Yet when she is tired of her lonely cabin on the mountains, she is always welcome in the clean little quayside dwelling where Nessie as Mrs. Qualthrough keeps house for Willie and her father. Many a time too poor Curphey takes a chair by the fireside, and tells wild half crazy tales to pass the hours away. He always retains his admiration for Nessie, and because he once tried, however foolishly, to render help to Willie, Nessie has a warm spot in her heart for him. MADELEINE NUGENT. INTERCESSION When you wake upon your bed When the noon-day sun is bright Dear Lord Jesus, slain on rood, When the evening brings all home: Dear Lord Jesus, slain on rood, All dear souls who die this eve! When at night you toss awake, Cry, and Heaven will hear your cry. KATHARINE TYNAN. S THE ANGEL OF PAIN INCE that ill-starred day when Adam led the weeping Eve out of the Garden of Eden, man's life has been a constant oscillation between joy and sorrow. Nor has the beat been regular. Sometimes the pendulum swings quickly from sorrow to joy, but more often its energy impels it in an opposite direction and it pauses at sorrow and pauses long. Sometimes, too, it oscillates evenly for a lengthened period, in an arc of small magnitude and there ensues a time of comparative peace, but often after such, a change comes suddenly and the beat becomes spasmodic, having scarcely swung away from sorrow when it is back again. It was of a time like this that Shakespeare wrote When sorrows come, they come not single spies But in battalions! There is nothing in the world so universal as pain. No one has ever escaped it. The earliest records of the world are records of disappointment and trouble, sin and death, and what are these but pain in one form or another? It is a far cry to Solomon's, "Laughter shall be in the midst of sorrow." And since his day, how many thoughts have crystallised round the word "sorrow," how many rhymes have been rung on this theme, to how many masterpieces in colour and sound and form has it not given birth and alas! too, to how many crimes! It is scarcely possible to open a book without somewhere finding reference to the inexorable law of pain. It is impossible to deal with life and exclude life's inseparable companion. Life and pain are of twin birth; together they fret their little hour on the stage and generally make their exit hand in hand. "For we are born in others' pain, And perish in our own." Every budding hour enfolds some pain, mayhap, trivial as a crumpled petal on a rose, but even this slight defect is capable of marring to some extent the beauty of the flower. It is not the magnitude of the trouble in other people's eyes, that is its true size; it is what it appears to us. When the Angel of Pain comes to us, he seems to assume the proportions of a Titan, but when he visits our neighbour, he is in our eyes a mere pigmy. But were our neighbour consulted, his opinion would be the direct opposite of ours. Most things in life, especially suffering, depend on our sense of perspective. One man's mountain is another man's molehill. A's joke may be B's tragedy. The loss of a child's toy has for that child something of the grief that the loss of a son has for a mother, with this difference, that the child forgets sooner. It is, therefore, absurd as well as unfair to measure other people's depth of suffering by our own standards. No two human hearts are alike and only the God who made them, with their infinite diversities, knows exactly what element in a trial hurts most keenly in each individual case. This it is, perhaps, which makes most sympathy futile. So few understand all the bearings of our particular grief. Joy is more easily understood. But a great deal of pain's heavy pressure is due to its loneliness. As somebody says: There's room in the halls of pleasure For a long and lordly train, But one by one, we must all file on Does anyone escape the universal law? No. Suffering of some kind is meted out to all. To one, it is physical pain, to another mental in some one of the thousand permutations such pain is capable of. But to be freed from suffering, from the cradle to the grave, is given to none. "If it be not now, then it is to come." Some favoured mortals apparently live for years without any trial, but eventually a day will come when the placid surface of their soul will be whipped into agitation and distress by the winds of temptation or the storms of sorrow. And lake storms are often very destructive! Besides, who is to guarantee that what seemed to us calm is so in reality? Are not the world's worst griefs hidden under a calm exterior? No one will deny that pain is the most universal force in human life, but some may be found who are ignorant of its necessity. Now as Bossuet says, "God has two ways of controlling us, by the commandments and by circumstances.' It is true that observance of the commandments wins us heaven, or rather, saves us from hell. But how are our relative positions in the Kingdom of the Elect to be assigned? "As star differeth from star in glory," so will the Just rendered perfect. Our Lord tells us that in His Father's House there are many mansions. And how may these be allotted, if not according to our Christ-like behaviour in what Bossuet calls "circumstances," i.e., the troubles and tangles and trials of life? Our nearness to God in heaven will be in proportion to our love of Him while we were on earth, and our love of Him will have been manifested by our conduct under the sufferings of life. Suffering is part of love,-a great part. Even human love is three-parts pain. As Francis Thompson says, "Love is the ambassador of loss." Christ our Lord loved us with an incomprehensible love and showed it by veiling His Divinity in our human nature, by enduring the limitations and trials incidental to life, and finally by bearing those unparalelled sufferings that culminated in the agonies of Calvary. Moreover Christ did not come on earth to remove suffering, but to show us how to bear it. He constantly preached the necessity of suffering: 66 If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow Me"; " If they have persecuted Me, they will also persecute you." His disciples taught the same lesson. Everyone knows St. Paul's magnificent utterance, "Whom the Lord loveth, He chastiseth and He scourgeth every son whom He receiveth. Persevere under discipline. God dealeth with you as with His sons; for what son is there, whom the father doth not correct? But if you be without chastisement, whereof all are made partakers; then are you bastards and not sons." (Hebrews, Ch. XII.) Certainly, while on earth, Our Lord often performed miracles to remove suffering, both mental and physical, but this was because "the Bridegroom was with them," and the recipients of such favours understood that they were favours, not rights. Even to this day, similar miracles are performed through the intercession of the saints, for the arm of the Lord is not shortened. But they are comparatively rare. The |