“A year ago my little boy displeased me horribly by something he did. People say, ‘Children will be children.’ But I see little consolation in that. They’re made to be good children, just as men are made to be good men. Without telling you what he did, all I will say is that he did a mean thing. You see his mother can hardly keep from crying now at the thought of it. Thank God, she was of one mind with me. I told him I must whip him, that I could not bear doing it, but that I would rather even kill him and be hanged for it than that he should be a damned, mean, contemptible little rascal. I imagine that sounds awful, but—”

“Not in the least,” said Barbara. “I like a man to curse what is bad and go down on his knees to what is good.”

“Well, what do you think the little fellow said?—‘I will be good, papa!’ he cried. ‘Please don’t be hanged for my naughtiness! Whip me and make me good!’”

“And then you couldn’t do it?”

“I cried,” said Wingfold, almost crying again as he said it. “I couldn’t help it. The child took out his little pocket-handkerchief and dried my eyes, and then prepared himself for the spanking. And I whipped him as I never had before, and hope in God shall never have to do again. When it was over and I sat holding him, both of us with tears in our eyes, he said, ‘I will try never to make you cry again, papa.’ And ever since then I have been thinking about the suffering in the world. I don’t like pain a whit better than any other person, and I don’t bear it nearly as well as Helen. But it doesn’t bother me in the least—in brain and heart, I mean—that God sends it.

“After whipping my son, I knew that the tears the Lord wept over Jerusalem were not only wept by him, but by the Father as well. Whoever says that God cannot suffer does not understand. God can weep, and weeps more painful tears than ours, for he is God and we are his little ones.

“The suffering we see around us hurts God more than it hurts us, or even more than it hurts the man or woman upon whom it falls. But he hates things that most men think nothing of, and will send any suffering upon them rather than have them continue indifferent to them.