You may speculate whether suffering would or would not have been a condition of progress if there had been no Fall. The first impulse is to answer unhesitatingly that it would not—suffering has a place only in a world whose processes are warped by evil, it can have no place in the scheme of an all-loving and all-powerful God. But, after a little reflection, you realise that, though suffering as we know it could certainly have had no place in a sinless world, nevertheless some process of which our suffering is a perverted image may have been a condition of advance. The free creature gladly doing battle with its environment in order to fulfil with a pure and loving will the intelligible purposes of God is of a different order from the creature bound by sin, who endures ignorantly and unwillingly its conditions of progress, which indeed has the power to abuse them into conditions of failure, so that pain no longer brings its certain redemption. Directly suffering becomes voluntary and intelligent it is no longer suffering at all. The misery lies in the clouded mind and will, and it is for this clouding that sin is responsible. No one of us has ever suffered entirely of clear purpose or free will, so it is impossible for us to know the place of suffering in the Purpose of God. But to the stumbling pain of our first ancestors we owe the fact that we stand upright upon our feet, to the first glimmerings of logos-light that bade them stay and fight a new environment rather than follow their old one into happiness we owe, humanly speaking, the fact that we are men. The light shined in darkness, and the darkness overpowered it not. The pale February dusk is a-flower with the promise of Spring. March _Month of the Passion_ The softness has gone from the air, which no longer smells of earth. Indeed some of the sharpness of January is back again; but it is back no more as a binding force—rather as a breath, a movement, a release. The gale sweeps the sky along with it over the fields—the clouds race their shadows over the young grass, and over the last barrenness of the winter ploughings. The spring ploughs are now at work, tearing up the earth’s back, and already the first flowers are a-bloom, while the willow-catkins in the hedge have reached a yellow ripeness. They are like splashes of sunshine in the hedge, beside the white moony patches of the first wild cherry. In spite of the Lenten austerity and cold of the earth and air, there is throughout the country-side a sense of released warmth; the flying, tattered blue of the sky has lost its winter paleness, the sunshine already has a spring heat in it, the shadows have in them a depth of passional violet—they are no longer cold and grey and dead, but living, like the sun. * * * * *