ng to do. Intimate fellowship and close contact with
others does bring pains as well as pleasures. It is the condition of
completeness and fullness of moral and spiritual life; and the man who
will live at his best must accept these pains with courage and
resolution.

THE VICE OF DEFECT.

+The outcome of indifference and lack of sympathy and fellowship is
selfishness.+--Unless we first feel another's interests as he feels
them, we cannot help being more interested in our own affairs than we
are in his, and consequently sacrificing his interests to our own when
the two conflict. As George Eliot tells us in "Adam Bede," "Without this
fellow-feeling, how are we to get enough patience and charity toward our
stumbling, falling companions in the long, changeful journey? And there
is but one way in which a strong, determined soul can learn it, by
getting his heart-strings bound round the weak and erring, so that he
must share not only the outward consequence of their error, but their
inward suffering. That is a long and hard lesson."

+It is impossible to overcome selfishness directly.+--As long as our
poor, private interests are the only objects vividly present to our
imagination and feeling, we must be selfish. The only remedy is the
indirect one of entering into fellowship with others, interesting
ourselves in what interests them, sharing their joys and sorrows, their
hopes and fears. When we have done that, then there is something besides
our petty and narrow personal interests before our minds and thoughts;
and so we are in a way to get something besides mean and selfish actions
from our wills and hands. We act out what is in us. If there is nothing
but ourselves present to our thoughts, we shall be selfish of necessity;
and without even knowing that we are selfish. If our thoughts and
feelings are full of the welfare and interests of others we shall do
loving and unselfish deeds, without ever stopping to think that they are
loving and unselfish. Hence the precept, "Keep thy heart with all
diligence, for out of it are the issues of life." A heart and mind full
of sympathy and fellow-feeling is the secret of a loving life; and an
idle mind and an empty heart, to which no thrill of sympathy with others
is ever admitted, is the barren and desolate region from which loveless
looks and cruel words and selfish deeds come forth.

+Love is not a virtue which we can cultivate in ourselves by direct
effort of will, and then t