that, however strongly its phenomena may excite our imagination,
they can scarcely, if at all, awake our emotions to any sympathy.
But there is an order of life just below us, spread like a stratum
all over the world, land and sea, with a sentience so akin to our
own that its phenomena and incidents are readily interpreted into
terms of our own consciousness and profoundly stir our emotions
of sympathy. In the strata of the earth we read the history of
this animal life from its dawn in the primeval ocean to the pres
ent period. What an inconceivably enormous aggregate of life,
and every unit of it has quivered in torrents and suffering inex
pressible ; and, finally, yielded to the last agony, death.
"For every draft of vital breath
In earth, or air, or ocean,
The melancholy gates of death
Respond with sympathetic motion."
The whole human race, with all its higher, keener power of suf
fering, has been copartner with its more lowly comrades in this
tragedy of pain through the world ages. How fitly the words of
St. Paul apply to this whole realm of physical life, "For we know
that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together
until now."
Appalling as is this universality of pain through all the geologic
ages in all realms of physical life, it is in the spiritual life of man
that we reach the most terrible of all suffering, the utmost depth
and intensity of pain.
A phenomenon so universal, to the race and to the individual,
so profound, so terrible, so mysterious, must necessarily greatly
influence thought and life, toning literature, shaping religious be
lief and observances, fashioning habits and customs and institu
tions.
The treatment of pain in the masterpieces of the world's litera
ture would furnish an interesting study. There is no great work in
creative literature, no work that holds a permanent place in the
highest rank, that does not have to do with 'suffering. Homer, and
Virgil, 'and Dante, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Gcethe—take
pain and all that has relation thereto from their immortal works
and you take from them what makes them immortal.