Its efficacy consisted not in the physical pains, but in the entire
yielding up of the will. Thus it represents for us that victory over
self which is the only path to eternal life.

But this victory, even now in these emphatically feather-bed days, is
always more or less painful. In the early times it meant persecution,
poverty, isolation, death, for the sake of Jesus Christ.

It is always so; the greatest deeds the world has ever known,
nationally, or individually, have been wrought out by suffering; because
suffering, more than any other agent, deepens character.

Look around among your friends and acquaintances. Who are the morally
strongest? To whom do you turn in your times of difficulty, doubt,
trouble? Not to those whose lives have been easy, to whom the lines have
fallen in pleasant places, to whom success has come without effort! No!
You turn to the one who has fought his way through the doubt, the
difficulty, the trouble, and you find a tower of strength. There is the
secret of Charles Kingsley's power as a counsellor; once he did not
believe that there was a God; he went through the agonies of doubt.

There is the secret of the wondrous force of Archbishop Temple. Rough,
rugged, almost discourteous at times; hating shams and penetrating
them with an unerring instinct, but tenderness itself to the really
distressed. He knew what it was as a lad to do field labour in poor
clothes and with insufficient food. In later years, when up at College,
he was wont to study by the light in the passage, because he could not
afford oil for his own lamp.