He soothes¹ to peace the indignant souls of slaves.

Edgar Fawcett.

Sometimes we are kept awake by pain. Some persons suffer pain that has no remission, except the temporary deadness that comes from nervous exhaustion—and sleep.

 

But sometimes the hardest torture is the thought that the pain is unnecessary or useless. I went once to visit a friend, whom I found suffering from the worst abscesses on the back of the neck that I ever saw, so frightful² that the sight of them made me, who am a strong man, feel faint. I asked sympathetically what was the matter. “Oh,” he said, “I’m getting some experience.” That consciousness that such pain was useful helped to make the agony less unendurable. In fact, though he did not see it all then, he was getting just what he and those about him needed. He was a vigorous man, who took to rural work in a place where the food was excellent; he was naturally gluttonous67 and overate, hence the boils. This he learned; and also how to bear pain.

 

There are ways of bearing pain more easily. We must consider the pain philosophically³, and treat it from all three sides—the bodily, the intellectual, and the spiritual.

 

However advanced we may be, it is foolish to deny that, in common with the rest of mankind, we are more or less in what Paul called the bonds of the flesh. To try to treat an aching tooth without physical means is like trying to grow a new leg instead of getting an artificial one. There was a stage in man’s Pre-Adamite progress from the amœba when, like the crab⁴, he could grow new legs. Possibly, by discarding all other faculties⁵, men might again be able to grow new legs: but it would not pay.

 

A man who makes hammers may at one time have made his own files, had a shop for that. But, as trades became specialized⁶, he found it better and cheaper to buy his files. Perhaps the supply is suddenly cut off. Now he could reassemble from the scrap-heap the file

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