humiliated.

We have seen that in order to be powerful we have to submit to
the laws of the universal forces, and to realise in practice that
they are our own. So, in order to be happy, we have to submit
our individual will to the sovereignty of the universal will, and
to feel in truth that it is our own will. When we reach that
state wherein the adjustment of the finite in us to the infinite
is made perfect, then pain itself becomes a valuable asset. It
becomes a measuring rod with which to gauge the true value of our
joy.

The most important lesson that man can learn from his life is not
that there _is_ pain in this world, but that it depends upon him
to turn it into good account, that it is possible for him to
transmute it into joy. The lesson has not been lost altogether
to us, and there is no man living who would willingly be deprived
of his right to suffer pain, for that is his right to be a man.
One day the wife of a poor labourer complained bitterly to me
that her eldest boy was going to be sent away to a rich relative's
house for part of the year. It was the implied kind intention of
trying to relieve her of her trouble that gave her the shock, for
a mother's trouble is a mother's own by her inalienable right of
love, and she was not going to surrender it to any dictates of
expediency. Man's freedom is never in being saved troubles, but
it is the freedom to take trouble for his own good, to make the
trouble an element in his joy. It can be made so only when we
realise that our individual self is not the highest meaning of our
being, that in us we have the world-man who is immortal, who is
not afraid of death or sufferings, and who looks upon pain as only