C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Suffering
Suffering is part of the divine idea.
Mirth cannot move a soul in agony.
Some of His children must go into the furnace to testify that the Son of God is there with them.
A great part of human suffering has its root in the nature of man, and not in that of his institutions.
We have suffered lightly, if we have suffered what we should weep for.
What is deservedly suffered must be borne with calmness, but when the pain is unmerited, the grief is resistless.
The cross of Christ is the pledge to us that the deepest suffering may be the condition of the highest blessing; the sign, not of God’s displeasure, but of His widest and most compassionate face.
Our merciful Father has no pleasure in the sufferings of His children; He chastens them in love; He never inflicts a stroke He could safely spare; He inflicts it to purify as well as to punish, to caution as well as to cure, to improve as well as to chastise.
Not till I was shut up to prayer and to the study of God’s word by the loss of earthly joys—sickness destroying the flavor of them all—did I begin to penetrate the mystery that is learned under the cross. And wondrous as it is, how simple is that mystery! To love Christ, and to know that I love Him—this is all.