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Updated: June 12, 2025
God, however, as has been pointed out in the very beginning of these pages, does not only punish the wrongdoings of His children. He chastises because He is just, and He chastens because He loves. Having chastened them, He cannot, in His great mercy, leave them to their fate.
Suppose, for instance, God were to take away the desire of our eyes, with a stroke. Suppose we were to lose a wife, a darling child; suppose we were struck blind, or paralytic; suppose some unspeakable, unbearable shame fell on us to-morrow: could we say then, God is love, and this horrible misery is a sign of it? He loves me, for he chastens me?
Now, even if you suffer somewhat in this life for your sins, that suffering is not punishment, but wholesome chastisement, as when a father chastens the son in whom he delighteth. All He asks of you is to long and try to give up your sins, for He will help you to give them up. All He asks of you is to long and try to lead a new life, for He will give you power to lead a new life.
Is it not therefore, a first step towards atheism to efface every sign of pious sorrow in this way, to neglect to impress on children who are not yet old enough to reflect, and on all other people who stand in need of example, the necessity of obedience to human law, by openly manifested resignation to the will of Providence, who chastens and consoles, who bestows and takes away worldly wealth?
We may deserve grief but why should these be unhappy? except that we know that Heaven chastens those whom it loves best; being pleased, by repeated trials, to make these pure spirits more pure.
But she went back to them now, straining her eyes through the darkness of her own past, recalling her father's days of spiritual depression, and the few difficult words she had sometimes heard from him as to those bitter times of religious dryness and hopelessness, by which God chastens from time to time His most faithful and heroic souls.
And the soul said, 'Blessed are they that mourn; and I rejoiced at the new trial which brought me nearer to Him who chastens those He loves." "But thy banished kin the valiant, the wise; they who placed thy lord on the throne?" "Was it no comfort," answered the Queen simply, "to think that in the House of God my prayers for them would be more accepted than in the halls of kings?
The discipline of mathematics is not culture in the strict sense; but the discipline that chastens the taste, feeds the imagination, kindles the sympathies, clarifies the reason, stirs the conscience and leads to self-knowledge and self-control, is culture. This we can only get from literature.
We are only chastened, as a father chastens his child. And that we are chastised for pride, who does not know? What proverb more common, what proverb more true, than that after pride comes a fall? Why is it so? Why has God so ordered the world and human nature, that pride punishes itself?
It chastens and sweetens the nature, teaches patience and resignation, and promotes the deepest as well as the most exalted thought. "The best of men That e'er wore earth about Him was a sufferer; A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit The first true gentleman that ever breathed." Suffering may be the appointed means by which the highest nature of man is to be disciplined and developed.
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