diverting
thoughts, and a new outlook, and to open up avenues for pleasure, and
entertainment, and profit, in place of tears and condolence.

Sympathy, without alleviating actions to a sufferer, is like a cloud
without rain to the parched earth.

But the great majority of people whom we encounter are making their own
crosses, and we who offer them sympathy, and condolence, are but adding
to the burden's weight.

I do not recommend coldness, indifference, or ridicule as a substitute
for sympathy. But instead of leading the sick man on to tell you the
details of his illness, and to describe all his symptoms, while your
own body responds with sympathetic aches and pains as you listen, it is
kinder to divert his attention to some cheerful and merry topic, or to
refer to some case like his own which resulted in perfect restoration
to health. Instead of going down into his underground cave of
depression, bring him out into the wholesome sunlight of your own
healthful state, even if for a moment only, and impress upon his mind
that health belongs to him, and must return to him.

To the man in business trouble the same advice applies.

Tell him you are sorry for him, but do not take on his despondency to
prove it.

Talk of the future and all the possibilities it holds for a determined
man or woman.

Make him laugh. Speak of trouble as the gymnasium where our moral
muscles are developed. Answer him that everything he desires is his if
he will be persistent and determined in demanding his own. If you put
force in your words you will leave an impression.

Do not go away from the house of trouble in tears, but leave the
troubled ones you called upon smiling as you depart.

That is true sympathy.

The Breath

A man reproved me for my interest in New Thought creeds.

"The old religion I learned at my mother's knee is good enough for me!"
he said. "It is good enough for anybody!"

Yet this man's mother had always "enjoyed poor health," as the old lady
expressed it, and the man himself was forever talking of his diseases,
his ill luck, his poverty, which he said he had been enabled to endure
only through the sustaining power of the religion "learned at his
mother's knee."

It would be difficult to convince the man that had his mother taught
him the creed of the "New Religion" he could have changed all these
unfortunate conditions.

Life-long ill health would have been impossible for his mother, or for
h