ch what you do
not practice? The answer of the brave heart is that, if one is aware
of failure, if one has suffered, if one has gathered experience, one
must be ready to share it. If I falter and stumble under my own heavy
load, which I have borne so querulously, so clumsily, shall not I say a
word which can help a fellow-sufferer to bear his load more easily,
help him to avoid the mistakes, the falls into which my own perversity
has betrayed me? To make another's burden lighter is to lighten one's
own burden; and, sinful as it may be to err, it is still more sinful to
see another err, and be silent, to withhold the word that might save
him. Perhaps no one can help so much as one that has suffered himself,
who knows the turns of the sad road, and the trenches which beset the
way.

For thus comes most truly the joy of repentance; it is joy to feel that
one's own lesson is learnt, and that the feeble feet are a little
stronger; but if one may also feel that another has taken heed, has
been saved the fall that must have come if he had not been warned, one
does not grudge one's own pain, that has brought a blessing with it,
that is outside of one's own blessing; one hardly even grudges the sin.

XXXVIII

The Secret

I have been away from my books lately, in a land of downs and valleys;
I have walked much alone, or with a silent companion--that greatest of
all luxuries. And, as is always the case when I get out of the reach
of books, I feel that I read a great deal too much, and do not meditate
enough. It sounds indolent advice to say that one ought to meditate;
but I cannot help feeling that reading is often a still more indolent
affair. When I am alone, or at leisure among my books, I take a volume
down; and the result is that another man does my thinking for me. It
is like putting oneself in a comfortable railway carriage; one runs
smoothly along the iron track, one stops at specified stations, one
sees a certain range of country, and an abundance of pretty things in
flashes--too many, indeed, for the mind to digest; and that is the
reason, I think, why a modern journey, even with all the luxuries that
surround it, is so tiring a thing. But to meditate is to take one's
own path among the hills; one turns off the track to examine anything
that attracts the attention; one makes the most of the few things that
one sees.

Reading is often a mere saving of trouble, a soporific for a restless
brain. This