Søren Kierkegaard asked how the burden can be light if the suffering is heavy in his 1847 book Edifying Discourses in Diverse Spirits. He also said the happiness of eternity still outweighs even the heaviest temporal suffering in the same book. These statements were paradoxical. A year later he said 1848 was his richest and most fruitful year he had experienced as an author. Christian Discourses was published April 26, 1848 under Kierkegaard's own name. He makes similar statements in this book. Hardship procures hope. The poorer you become the richer you make others. Adversity is prosperity. He also writes about the eminent pagan killing God and then flying high over the abyss and spiritual communism. His twenty-eight discourses are divided into four equal sections of seven discourses moving his reader from paganism to the suffering Christian and then turning polemical in his third section and he finally gets the single individual before God in his final section. Structure The book consists of four parts each containing seven discourses of ascending levels of religious development. Kierkegaard used the term discourse rather than sermon because a sermon presupposes authority and doesn’t deal with doubt. He said over and over the “author does not have authority to preach and by no means claims to be a teacher”. But these are not upbuilding discourses they are Christian Discourses offered with the right hand instead of the pseudonymous writings which were offered with the left hand. He used Matthew 6:24-34 as his text for the Introduction and Part One. Part Two dealt with how the Christian handles adversity and suffering in life. Part Three is more polemical and aims to "wound from behind". Part Four combines simplicity and earnestness with reflection presenting crucial Christian concepts. Kierkegaard's goal is to awaken interest in the things of the spirit in his first and second discourses and moving directly to Christianity in his later discourses. Introduction The bird and the lily are compared with the pagan and the Christian in an attempt to show them the "schoolmasters and how we learn from the birds to relinquish all our troubled concerns." These teachers were introduced by Christ in the Sermon on the Mount (Gospel), the same place the Law was introduced so many years ago by Moses. The bird and the lily judge no one and condemn no one so an individual can learn from them what it