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Therefore I believe that, before we can hope to enter into that intimate and blessed communion with God which transfigures all life, two great conditions must be fulfilled. We must have settled it in our hearts that everything, from the least to the greatest, is to be taken as His language—language which it is our main business here to learn to interpret—and we must be willing to face all pain as His discipline.

I know, of course, that these two conditions can be perfectly fulfilled only as the result of much discipline and much experience of the very guidance in question. But their roots—docility and courage—are in some measure implanted in us long before we begin to think about such questions as the government of the world or the ordering of our lives.

It is, I believe, in the last of these two demands of logic, the demand upon our courage, that the moral hindrance to a full belief in Divine guidance mainly lies. People cannot bring themselves to feel that the infliction of pain can be the act of One whom they desire to know as Love. Yet this is the very central demand of Christianity. What is courage but the willingness to encounter suffering, the readiness to take up the cross?