Page:The way of Martha and the way of Mary (1915).djvu/172

150 The religion of suffering, of which so much is said, is a term easily misunderstood, meaning differently in the mouths of different people. The political propagandist holds that the Russian people are melancholy because their institutions are so bad, and that the religion of suffering is the religion of revolution, a growing resentment against the government.

The morbid Russian will say that the religion of suffering is the knowledge of the truth that only in suffering and near to death can you understand anything about life. He will deny that anything else can teach you.

The peasant pilgrim will interpret it as the religion of taking to the road and bearing the cross; being a beggar for Christ's sake; refusing a lift on the road to the Sepulchre, holding that where Christ walked it is not for them to ride.

Another will say it is the religion that helps you to face suffering, and point to Tolstoy's story of the death of Ivan Ilyitch. Ivan Ilyitch was a man who had no religion, and had never faced suffering in his life, an ordinary bourgeois of the type of lower intelligentsia, jovial, selfish, cynical, fond of cards and of his dinner, and having no other particular interest in life except an ambition to make more money. Suddenly he is stricken with cancer, and lives for years in increasing pain till at last he dies in agony. He has no spiritual comfort; pain quite o'ercrows his spirit. The truth is, no pain really conquers the