Lessons in Life; A Series of Familiar EssaysHolland, J. G. (Josiah Gilbert)
Philosophy
Lessons in Life; A Series of Familiar Essays
Holland, J. G. (Josiah Gilbert)
Conduct of life
rising, but they cling to the earth, and feel the difference as a
humiliation. Alas! how many souls chafe against the consciousness
of inferior powers, till even the fine susceptibilities with which
nature endowed them are destroyed!
There would seem to be no end of the causes which produce sore and
tender and sensitive spots upon the human soul. I have said
nothing of grief and love and pity and anger, and a whole brood of
powerful passions, but they are all operative toward the results
which we are discussing. The cure for these sensitive sores is
obvious enough. I would prescribe for a man as I would for a
horse--go out to pasture, or adopt another kind of collar, and
never wear the old one again. If a man has become sore by working
against the apathy, the misconceptions, the misconstructions, and
the prejudices of the world, so that he feels the galling burden
of the collar in all his actions, let him change his style of
labor until the ulcer heal. If the conscience becomes sore,
relieve it of that which made it sore, and never believe that
padding can effect a cure. Even wounded pride will heal if we let
it alone, and refrain from opening the wound on all occasions, and
rubbing it against the causes which inflicted it. All the natural
peculiarities of our constitution which wound our pride may be
happily got along with by ignoring them. If my neighbor is a
lovable man, I do not love him any the less because he wears a
long nose, and I should never think of it if he were not always
joking about it, and trying to convince me that it did not offend
him. A man who quarrels with his own constitution, and questions
the benevolence that adjusted it to its conditions, quarrels with,
and questions, his Maker. I believe there are no sorenesses of the
sort we are considering which time or change will not heal.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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