Worry must not be confused with anxiety, though both words agree in meaning, originally, a “choking,” or a “strangling,” referring, of course, to the throttling effect upon individual activity. Anxiety faces large issues of life seriously, calmly, with dignity. Anxiety always suggests hopeful possibility; it is active in being ready, and devising measures to meet the outcome. Worry is not one large individual sorrow; it is a colony of petty, vague, insignificant, restless imps of fear, that become important only from their combination, their constancy, their iteration. When Death comes, when the one we love has passed from us, and the silence and the loneness and the emptiness of all things make us stare dry-eyed into the future, we give ourselves up, for a time, to the agony of isolation. This is not a petty worry we must kill ere it kills us. This is the awful majesty of sorrow that mercifully benumbs us, though it may later become, in the mysterious working of omnipotence, a rebaptism and a regeneration. It is the worry _habit_, the constant magnifying of petty sorrows to eclipse the sun of happiness, against which I here make protest. To cure worry, the individual must be his own physician; he must give the case heroic treatment. He must realize, with every fibre of his being, the utter, absolute uselessness of worry. He must not think this is commonplace,—a bit of mere theory; it is a reality that he must translate for himself from mere words to a real, living fact. He must fully understand that if it were possible for him to spend a whole series of eternities in worry, it would not change the fact one jot or tittle. It is a time for action, not worry, because worry paralyzes thought and action, too. If you set down a column of figures in addition, no amount of worry can change the sum total of those figures. That result is wrapped up in the inevitability of mathematics. The result can be made different only by changing the figures as they are set down, one by one, in that column. The one time that a man cannot afford to worry is when he _does_ worry. Then he is facing, or imagines he is, a critical turn in affairs. This is the time when he needs one hundred per cent. of his mental energy to make his plans quickly, to see what is his wisest decision, to keep a clear eye on the sky and on his course, and a firm hand on the helm until he has weathered the storm in safety. There are two reasons why man should not worry, either one of which must operate in every instance. First, because he _cannot_ prevent the results he fears. Second, because he _can_ prevent them. If he be powerless to avert the blow, he needs perfect mental concentration to meet it bravely, to lighten its force, to get what salvage he can from the wreck, to sustain his strength at this time when he must plan a new future. If he _can_ prevent the evil he fears, then he has no need to worry, for he would by so doing be dissipating energy in his very hour of need.