Great is the mystery of suffering; yet this much we know: suffering is in the very warp and woof of the slow progress of mankind from ''the vanity of time to the riches of eternity,'' so deeply interwoven into the stuff of things that the very Captain of our salvation, in order to be ''made like unto His brethren'' had to be ''made perfect through suffering.'' Borne rebelliously it ''works death''; borne courageously it purifies; borne vicariously it helps to redeem.
All men taste of it, the innocent with the guilty; but not till the Creator was crucified was there placed within reach of a groaning and groping humanity, not indeed the full explanation of suffering, but at least the key to its transmutation: we have to learn that faith transforms the messenger of Satan into the means of grace: that believers are to glory in tribulations, count trials all joy, because all things work together for good to them that love God: and that God's soldiers are to see in their crosses the mystery of the birth-process, whereby death works in us, but life in others, for only the corn of wheat which falls into the ground and dies bears ''much fruit.''
-''Alfred Buxton of the Congo and Abyssinia'' by Norman Grubb
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