one cannot pump one's own tastes and character into others.
The only hope is that they should develop their own qualities. Other
people ought not to be 'problems' to us; they may be mysteries, but
that is quite another thing. To love people, if one can, is the only
way. To find out what is lovable in them and not to try to discover
what is malleable in them is the secret. A wise and witty lady, who
knows that she is tempted to try to direct other lives, told me that
one of her friends once remonstrated with her by saying that she ought
to leave something for God to do!

I know a very terrible and well-meaning person, who once spoke
severely to me for treating a matter with levity. I lost my temper,
and said, "You may make me ashamed of it, if you can, but you shall
not bully me into treating a matter seriously which I think is wholly
absurd." He said, "You do not enough consider the grave issues which
may be involved." I replied that to be for ever considering graver
issues seemed to me to make life stuffy and unwholesome. My censor
sighed and shook his head.

We cannot coerce any one into anything good. We may salve our own
conscience by trying to do so, we may even level an immediate
difficulty; but a free and generous desire to be different is the only
hope of vital change. The detestable Puritan fibre that exists in many
of us, which is the most utterly unchristian thing I know, tempts us
to feel that no discipline is worth anything unless it is dark and
gloomy; but that is the discipline of the law-court and the prison,
and has never remedied anything since the world began. Wickedness is
nearly always, perhaps always, a moral invalidism, and we shall see
some day that to punish men for crime by being cruel to them is like
condemning a man to the treadmill for having typhoid fever. I can only
say that the more I have known of human beings, and the older I grow,
the more lovable, gentle, sweet-tempered I have found them to be.

The life of Carlyle seems to me to be one of the most terrible and
convincing documents in the world in proof of what I have been saying.
The old man was so bent on battering and bumping people into
righteousness, so in love with spluttering and vituperating and
thundering all over the place, that he missed the truest and sweetest
ministry of love. He broke his wife's heart, and it is idle to pretend
he did not. Mrs. Carlyle was a sharp-edged woman too, and hurt her own
life by her bitter t