I have thought it advisable to dwell rather at length on the question of the insane, because it really rather fairly represents my point of view on this subject. Whether you agree with me or not, it is better that I should state quite fairly and straightly my position, which has only been reached by honestly striving after truth, and by looking fully into the subject for the purposes of this paper. In talking about Spiritual Healing, we are hampered at the start, because we have only actual knowledge of physical things, i.e. of things as they appear to us here. We have to define spiritual things in physical terms, because they are the only things we know and understand. Time and space do not exist in the spiritual domain. Take just one word in illustration of my meaning, the word _Rest_. Our present state of being here has certain peculiarities. Labour involves rest from labour, and if the limits of rest and labour are exceeded, the result is ruin to man’s moral and physical being. Disease is sure to follow the inactive mind or body, and then comes a time when ‘we cannot do the things we would.’ But these things do not exist in spiritual language. ‘They rest not day and night, but cry “Holy, Holy, Holy.”’ When we pray ‘Eternal rest grant them, O Lord,’ we have no thought of a period of rest as we understand it, but rest in and with God. We are far too apt to think that suffering is an evil--it is not necessarily so; on the contrary it may be a blessing, because it is often a direct means of advance towards perfection. Far too much attention is paid at the present day to temporal benefits. ‘Get rid of poverty, of suffering, and the world will be virtuous and happy,’ but this is not so. The people who starve and brutally ill-use their children are not the very poorest; they are usually well-to-do in the world. There is a great deal too much of considering poverty as a _real_ cause of suffering. Christ’s mission of redemption was not primarily a mission for the relief of suffering. If He bids us to take up our cross, He also bids us, as a quite essential corollary, to follow Him. Indeed, taking up our cross is useless, if we do not follow Him. Pain, far from being shunned, should be welcomed and embraced, because it brings us nearer to the sufferings of our Blessed Lord. It is not, of course, mere pain in itself that lifts and cleanses: it is pain rightly and courageously borne, from whatever motive. If this be true, the modern revolt against all suffering--and here I quote from the late Miss Caroline Stephens’s article on ‘Pain,’ published in the _Hibbert Journal_ for October 1908--‘is obviously suicidal. To extinguish all suffering, were that possible, would be to deprive the world of a leverage as all-pervading and effectual towards spiritual elevation and purification, as is gravitation towards stability.’