iven, but the necessity for patience is not
made clear. Patience is typical of all the other virtues. Many a man has
followed the best of advice for a time, and has become discouraged
because the promised results did not materialize. It is disappointing,
surely, to have lived upon a diet for months only to find that you still
have dyspepsia, or to have followed certain rules of morality with great
precision and enthusiasm without obtaining the untroubled mind. We are
accustomed to see results in the material world and naturally expect
them everywhere. The trouble is we do not always recognize improvements
when we see them, and we insist upon certain preconceived changes as a
result of our endeavors. The physician is apt rashly to promise definite
physical accomplishments in a given time. He is courting disappointment
and distrust when he does so. We all want to get relief from our
symptoms, and we are inclined to insist upon a particular kind of relief
so strongly that we fail to appreciate the possibilities of another and
a better relief which may be at hand. The going astray in this
particular is sometimes very unfortunate. I have known a man to rush
frantically from one doctor to another, trying to obtain relief for a
particular pain or discomfort, unwilling to rest long enough to find out
that the trouble would have disappeared naturally if he had taken the
advice of the first physician, to live without impatience and within his
limitations.

The human body is a very complex organism, and sometimes pain and
distress are better not relieved, since they may be the expression of
some deeper maladjustment which must first be straightened out. This is
also true of the mind--in which the unhappy proddings of conscience had
better not be cured by anodynes or by evasion unless we are prepared to
go deeply enough to make them disappear spontaneously. We must sometimes
insist upon patience, though it should exist as a matter of
course--patience with ourselves and with others. The physician who
demands and secures the greatest degree of patience from his clients is
the most successful practitioner, for no life can go on successfully
without patience. If patience can be spontaneous,--the natural result of
a broadening outlook,--then it will be permanent and serviceable; the
other kind, that exists by extreme effort, may do for a while, but it is
a poor makeshift.

I always feel like apologizing when I ask a man or a woman to b