No matter what our attitude of mind may be with regard to suffering, there is no question but that we have to stand it under present conditions in this little world of ours. During the next twelve months scarcely less than one hundred thousand persons will die of cancer in this country and a million and a half victims of the disease will breathe their last throughout the world. When we add up all the accidents in industry and transportation, all the wounds in war and civil life, and then add the affections which in one way or another cause mechanical stoppages of processes in the body, for these are the exquisitely painful conditions, it is easy to understand that we need consolation for suffering. An old medical axiom is that "the doctor can seldom cure but he can often relieve and can always console." There are a good many physicians, however, who feel their ability to console sadly {261} hampered by the fact that so many men and women in our time do not believe in a hereafter for which their sufferings in this world can be a preparation, and that therefore the terminal suffering of existence, of which there is and manifestly always will be such an amount, can mean nothing for them except just so much pain that has to be borne without any good reason that they can see, except that somehow or other things were so arranged in this world that there is ever so much more of pain and suffering than of joy in it. Two thousand years ago Cicero said in his own oratorical way that it was better for all of us to believe in immortality, for if there was no immortality we should never live after death to know it--which comes very near being an Irish bull by anticipation--while if there was, and we had not believed in it, there would come a very rude awakening to the truth of things. Something of the same problem has been put in much more flippant and yet very expressive way in modern slang. "If there is no other world than this, then some one handed us an awful lemon when we were sent into existence." That is, I suppose, one answer to the mystery of suffering so sure to come to all men in some way or other, and it is one that counsels us to seek the only real consolation for suffering,--that which is to be found in the religious feeling that somehow or other, somewhere, there is some one who knows and understands, and suffering has its meaning. "God's in His heaven and all's well with the world" in spite of the fact that "nature red in tooth and claw" works such sad havoc with her creatures.