offended; you can never be sure how
they are going to take anything. Such people are much of the time
suffering from wounded feelings, are displeased and offended. It is true
that some are of a highly nervous temperament and naturally feel things
more keenly than others, but it is not this natural nervous sensitiveness
that leads to the results above mentioned, it is a morbid and unnatural
state into which people allow themselves to enter. The natural feelings
may need restraint and careful cultivation, but these morbid feelings need
to be got rid of.

Sometimes people can bear to hear others ridiculed or talked about in a
gossiping way, or see them slighted, and think nothing of it or even be
amused; but when they themselves become the target for such things, it
almost kills them, or at least they feel almost killed. What makes this
great difference in their feelings? Why do they feel for themselves so
much more than they do for others? Trace the feeling back to its origin,
and you will find that their self-love is the thing that has been hurt. If
they loved others as they love themselves, they would feel just as much
hurt by that which was directed against the other as by that which was
directed at themselves. It is self-love that makes people easily offended
and easily wounded; and the more self-love they have, the easier they are
hurt and the quicker their resentment is aroused. Self-love begets vanity;
it quivers in keenest anguish at a sneer or a scornful smile; it is
distressed by even a fancied slight. Self-love throws the nerves of
sensation all out to the surface and makes them hyper-sensitive, and so
the person feels everything keenly. He is constantly smarting under a
sense of injustice. He feels he is constantly being mistreated.

Oh, this self-love! How many pains it brings! how many slights it sees!
how often it is offended! Reader, are you a victim of self-love? If you
are so sensitive, always being wounded and offended, self-love is what is
the trouble. If you will get rid of this self-love, you will be rid of
that morbid sensitiveness; that is, you will get rid of that morbid
sensitiveness that makes people have to be so careful with you.

Self-love makes a person wonder what others are thinking and saying about
him. It makes him suspicious of others, suspicious that they are saying or
thinking things that would hurt his feelings if known. If two others talk
in his presence and he can not hear what is