Averie Zumalt’s Reviews > The Problem of Pain > Status Update

He stoops to conquer. He will have us, even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is ‘nothing better’ now to be had.

Now God, who has made us, knows what we are, and that our happiness lies in Him. We will not seek it in Him as long as He leaves us any other resort where it can even possibly be looked for. While we what we call ‘our own life’ remains agreeable, we will not surrender it to Him.

Pain removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul.

Until the evil man finds evil unmistakably present in his existence, in the form of pain, he is enclosed in illusion.

Once pain has roused him, he knows that he is in someway or other ‘up against’ the real universe: he either rebels (with the possibility of a clearer issue and deeper repentance at some later stage) or else makes some attempted adjustment, which, if pursued, will lead him to religion.

“The world is a dance in which good, descending from God, is disturbed by evil arising from the creatures, and the resulting conflict is resolved by God‘s own assumption of the suffering nature which evil produces.” p.80