The Song of Solomon : and the Lamentations of Jeremiah

[0-I7.] THE CRY OF THE CHHDREN 149
mystery attaching to the whole subject of the presence
of pain and sorrow in young Hves that baffles all
reasoning. It is not only hard to understand why the
bud should be blighted before it has had time to open
to the sunshine : this haste in the march of misery to
meet her victims on the threshold of hfe is to our minds
a very amazing sight. And yet it is not the most
perplexing part of the problem raised by the mystery
of the suffering of children.
When we turn to the moral elements of the case we
encounter its most serious difficulties. Children may
not be accounted innocent in the absolute sense of the
word. Even unconscious infants come into the world
with hereditary tendencies to the evil habits of their
ancestors ; but then every principle of justice resists the
attachment of guilt or responsibility to an unsought
and undeserved inheritance. And although children
soon commit offences on their own account, it is not
the consequences of these 3^outhful follies that here
trouble us. The cruel wrongs of childhood that overshadow
the v.-orld's history with its darkest mystery
have travelled on to their victims from quite other
regions— regions of which the poor little sufferers are
ignorant with the ignorance of perfect innocence. Why
do children thus share in evils" they had no hand in
bringing upon the community ?
It is perhaps well that we should acknowledge quite
frankly that there are mysteries in life which no inge-
nuity of thought can fathom. The suffering of childhood
is one of the greatest of these apparently insoluble
riddles of the universe. We have to learn that in view
of such a problem as is here raised we too are but
infants crying in the night.
Still there is no occasion for us to aggravate the riddle