of its possibility. Perhaps the greater part of the energy of this
world's life goes forth in the endeavour to rid itself of discomfort.
Some, to escape it, leave their natural surroundings behind them, and
with strong and continuous effort keep rising in the social scale, to
discover at every new ascent fresh trouble, as they think, awaiting
them, whereas in truth they have brought the trouble with them. Others,
making haste to be rich, are slow to find out that the poverty of their
souls, none the less that their purses are filling, will yet keep them
unhappy. Some court endless change, nor know that on themselves the
change must pass that will set them free. Others expand their souls with
knowledge, only to find that content will not dwell in the great house
they have built. To number the varieties of human endeavour to escape
discomfort would be to enumerate all the modes of such life as does not
know how to live. All seek the thing whose defect appears the _cause_ of
their misery, and is but the variable _occasion_ of it, the cause of the
shape it takes, not of the misery itself; for, when one apparent cause
is removed, another at once succeeds. The real cause of his trouble is a
something the man has not perhaps recognized as even existent; in any
case he is not yet acquainted with its true nature.

However absurd the statement may appear to one who has not yet
discovered the fact for himself, the cause of every man's discomfort is
evil, moral evil--first of all, evil in himself, his own sin, his own
wrongness, his own unrightness; and then, evil in those he loves: with
this latter I have not now to deal; the only way to get rid of it, is
for the man to get rid of his own sin. No special sin may be
recognizable as having caused this or that special physical
discomfort--which may indeed have originated with some ancestor; but
evil in ourselves is the cause of its continuance, the source of its
necessity, and the preventive of that patience which would soon take