But these punishments, it is urged, fall on the innocent as well as the guilty. And this leads us to another point of view. Pain is not only punitive. It is also corrective and purgatorial. And this again is a fact of ordinary experience, quite apart from the further consideration of why it should be so. Among primitive races the penalties of law, by the merely mechanical process of forcibly restraining certain actions, slowly elevate the social tone. And as men rise in the scale of development and begin to be a law to themselves, the same process is continued within the individual mind. The pains and penalties of evil doing, physical and mental, tend to correct and purify the character; and when we say that men learn wisdom by experience, we mostly mean by experience of something painful. Of course, the most obvious form of this correction is that in which the suffering can be recognised by the sufferer as merited, because due to his own misdeeds. But apart from such causal connection, what we call unmerited suffering exercises the same influence in an even greater measure. Its forces, not being exhausted in the work of neutralising past evil, are able to expand and expend themselves in a positive direction, elevating, refining, dignifying the character to an infinite degree. The men of sorrows are the men of influence in every walk of life. Martyrdom is the certain road to success in any cause. Even more than knowledge, pain is power. And all this because it develops the latent capacities of our being as no other influence can. It requires no mystic insight to see the truth of this. However unable we may be to account for it, it is a fact of everyday experience, visible to ordinary common sense. And this being so, there is nothing of necessity unjust in what we call unmerited suffering, not even in the sad inheritance by children of the results of parental sin. For while the sight of the miserable entail may, if rightly used, become the parent's punishment, its imposition may be the child's call to higher things. True, like all other useful agencies, it often fails of its end; but such failure is of the problem of evil, not of the problem of pain. And, lastly, with men, as with animals, suffering is largely prophylactic. Bodily pain sounds the alarm bell of disease in time for its removal. Mental and moral pain arrest the issues of ignorant or evil courses before it is too late. While the desire to remove pain from ourselves, or better still from others, is among the strongest incentives of the scientific discoverer, the patriot, the philanthropist. And though it may seem a fallacy to credit pain with the virtues which spring from the desire for its removal, common sense rises above logic and recognises the real value of a spur without which many of our noblest activities would cease.