Then the New Birth took place, and suffering was redeemed together with all other human processes. The Incarnation means the taking up into the god-head of the complete manhood, a manhood of which suffering is an inevitable condition. By taking our flesh, Christ redeemed the entire process of the world, which sin had made blind and futile. He gave the world’s sorrows a place in the kingdom of heaven—grief, pain, struggle and death were given their place in the eternal mind of God. The fumbling processes of nature became supernatural—they were born again. Natural suffering, whether in man or beast, may be compared to the sacrifices of the old dispensation—“which could never make the comers thereunto perfect.” The Law stands for nature unredeemed as Grace stands for nature redeemed and becomes the Kingdom of God. Instead of the old sacrifices in which the unwilling and unknowing victim was offered by forces outside itself, to which at best it could only submit in the spirit of fear and meekness, came the new sacrifice of the Victim who is also the Priest, who of free will, full knowledge and true love offers up himself, a Priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek. The only deliverance from suffering is through sacrifice—through offering. Once a man accepts pain no longer in the spirit of rebellion or of blind endurance, or even of mere negative resignation, but in the spirit of co-operation, he is free. He becomes as it were the collaborator of God in the processes of the world—his will and understanding are restored to their pre-Adamic integrity. One of the graces of Calvary is this grace of offering. As perfect man, Christ offered all human suffering to God, with a perfect will and a perfect understanding, so that now by virtue of the Cross, mankind too becomes priest as well as victim. He too can offer what he endures—whether the endurance be sought, as in the case of the saints and ascetics, or merely suffered in the inevitable common way of life. On Calvary, suffering was redeemed from the bondage of the law, of nature and the old Covenant, and was made a part of the supernatural order, a thing of grace. It is the old symbolical antithesis between the Esau and Jacob, Sinai and Jerusalem, Adam and Christ—the Evangelical message of the changed heart—the mystical doctrine of the New Birth. Suffering has its place in the New Covenant in the Kingdom of God, and as it was before a law of natural development, becomes now a law of spiritual growth. The unwilling victim of blind and cruel processes is now the priest of an all-wise, all-loving God, offering pain and grief in union with Calvary in one tremendous sacrifice—till at last sorrow becomes the world’s eucharist, its sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. April _Month of the Resurrection_