ld to lighten and sweeten
them is to lose yourself in the service of others, in helping to bear
and lighten those of a fellow-being whose, perchance, are much more
grievous than your own. It is a great law of your being which says you
can do this. Try it, and experience the truth for yourself, and know
that, when turned in this way, sorrow is the most beautiful soul-refiner
of which the world knows, and hence not to be shunned, but to be
welcomed and rightly turned.

There comes to my mind a poor widow woman whose life would seem to have
nothing in it to make it happy, but, on the other hand, cheerless and
tiresome, and whose work would have been very hard, had it not been for
a little crippled child she dearly loved and cared for, and who was all
the more precious to her on account of its helplessness. Losing herself
and forgetting her own hard lot in the care of the little cripple, her
whole life was made cheerful and happy, and her work not hard, but easy,
because lightened by love and service for another. And this is but one
of innumerable cases of this kind.

So you may turn your sorrows, you may lighten your burdens, by helping
bear the burdens, if not of a crippled child, then of a brother or a
sister who in another sense may be crippled, or who may become so but
for your timely service. You can find them all about you: never pass one
by.

By building upon this principle, the poor may thus live as grandly and
as happily as the rich, those in humble and lowly walks of life as
grandly and as happily as those in what seem to be more exalted
stations. Recognizing the truth, as we certainly must by this time, that
one is _truly_ great only in so far as this is made the fundamental
principle of his life, it becomes evident that that longing for
greatness for its and for one's own sake falls away, and none but a
diseased mind cares for it; for no sooner is it grasped than, as a
bubble, it bursts, because it is not the true, the permanent, but the
false, the transient. On the other hand, he who forgetting self and this
kind of greatness, falsely so called, in the service of his fellow-men,
by this very fact puts himself on the right track, the only track for
the true, the genuine; and in what degree it will come to him depends
entirely upon his adherence to the law.

And do you know the influence of this life in the moulding of the
features, that it gives the highest beauty that can dwell there, the
beauty that come