Once for all the sinless suffering of the Cross has parted sin from suffering with a clearness of distinction never before achieved. The intellectual Greek had tended to confuse the two as kindred forms of ignorance; the weary Oriental as kindred consequences of our imprisonment in the body, 'the too too solid flesh;' the self-righteous Jew viewed blindness, or death from a falling tower, as evidence of exceptional sin. Everywhere in the ancient world the outlines of the two were undefined, and their true relation of antagonism misunderstood. But the sight of perfect sinlessness, combined with perfect suffering, has cleared our view for ever. Sin indeed always brings suffering in its train, but the suffering we now see to be of the nature of its antidote; an antidote often applied indeed with inexorable sternness, but in its intention wholly merciful. Thus every sin has its appropriate suffering. Bodily indulgence brings bodily disease; cruelty ends in cowardice; pride and vanity in shame. And though the suffering of itself cannot convert the sinner, it can and does prevent both the gratification and contagion of the sin. Then comes the more terrible sorrow of remorse; and remorse is potential penitence, and penitence potential purification. But while sin thus involves suffering, suffering does not involve sin. It is not only an antidote, but one of those antidotes which taken in time is prophylactic. And this is not only true of the pains of self-denial and self-sacrifice, the voluntary bearing of the cross, but of many an involuntary sorrow also. Delicate health, Plato's bridle of Theages, inherited pain, privation, bereavement, may all refine the character and train the spiritual eye to that purity of heart that shall see God. Pain in fact, in its manifold methods, is like the angel of the Eastern story, changing its form incessantly to cope with the shifting shapes of sin, and passing by turns into a lion, a bird, a sword, a flood, a flame, in sleepless eagerness to follow and find, and slay and quench and burn away the least last lingering particle of evil. So far from being our enemy it is our safest ally in the battle of life, and we fail through shrinking from the stern alliance. We suffer because we sin; but we also sin because we decline to suffer.