The Happiness of Suffering

Walsham traces the impact of the reformation on ideas about what the staunch Protestant should experience, exploring the exceptionally rich vein of thinking about emotion that was associated with religious belief and practice. She argues that Protestant reformers rejected the Catholic spiritual economy, in which suffering was regarded as a species of penance for sin, and accordingly the notion that suffering was salvific. Yet although the reformers emphasized that salvation depended on grace alone, suffering remained central to conceptions of the Christian life. This was partly a result of the Protestant experience of persecution, whose legacies included the belief that the endurance of suffering presented proof of faith, such that it should be embraced. Second-generation reformers continued to valorize suffering, but increasingly regarded it as a source of instruction and a spur to improvement, within a broadly providential world view.