It is well, then, to remind ourselves of the teaching of natural science in regard to the function of pain in the animal world. There, at least, it has originated, and has survived, only because of its actual use to the possessors of that nervous system which makes pain possible. It serves as a danger signal of such inestimable value that no race of animals, of any high degree of organisation, which could be incapable of suffering pain, could for any length of time continue to survive. Pain here, at any rate, so far from being purposeless, owes its existence to the purpose which it subserves. Ascending higher in the scale of being we see, as has been recently pointed out, that the progress of human civilisation has been very largely due to the successful efforts of man to resist and to remove pain. The most successful and progressive races of mankind are those which inhabit regions of the world where the conditions of life are neither so severe as to paralyse all exertion, or even to preclude its possibility, nor so favourable that men can avoid the pain of hunger or of cold without strenuous and unremitting effort. The stimulus of pain has been the means of perfecting the animal nature of man, and the secret of those victories which he has won over the inclement or dangerous forces of the material world, and which we call, in their totality, human civilisation. And thus we come in sight of a great law, "perfection through suffering." And the revelation of the Cross is the exhibition to us of this law acting in the higher reaches of man's existence, in the moral and spiritual regions of his life. As the animal has gained its victories in the past, so the spiritual is advancing towards the final triumph of man, along the same path, of healthy reaction stimulated and necessitated by pain. For wherein lies the triumph of the spiritual nature, save in its complete and sovereign control over all the other elements in our complex being? The spiritual man is not the man who has starved his physical or intellectual being; but the man whose whole nature, harmoniously developed in the whole range of its varied gifts and powers and faculties, is altogether brought under the mastery of that which is highest in him, that spirit in which he is akin to God, the wearer of the Divine Image. The saintliest, loftiest characters of men and women have been the fruits of this discipline.