There is
but one sight more beautiful than the mother of a family ministering
happiness and sunshine to them all; and that is a woman who, having no
family of her own, finds her life in giving cheer and comfort to all whom
she reaches, and makes a home atmosphere wherever she goes. Though she
have not the joy of wife and mother, she has that which is most sacred in
wifehood and motherhood. She shares the blessedness of that highest life
the earth has seen, of him who, having no home nor where to lay his head,
brought into other homes a new happiness, and who spoke the transforming
word, "It is more blessed to give than to receive."

Take, again, the case of an invalid, who is for a long period shut out by
illness or weakness from all ordinary activities. There are many such to
whom pain and physical endurance are less trying than the feeling of
being excluded from use and service, and having their moral life stunted
or disordered by this stoppage of the natural play of the faculties.
There are kinds of illness, especially those of the nervous system, which
seem to invade the seat of the will and soul itself, to irritate the
temper and sap the resolve and foster a self-centring egotism, by a power
that is literally irresistible. Before such experiences as this one
thought rises: it is part of mankind's business to lessen, and so far as
possible to extirpate, these maladies. The individual sufferer must meet
as best he can the conditions thrust upon him, but to prevent such
conditions from arising is the lesson for the rest of us. We are only
beginning to appreciate how largely the salvation of mankind must be
worked out through physical means. The pestilences, the transmitted
diseases, the insanities, the nervous disorders, bred of violated
law,--all these and the like curses, which not merely destroy human life
but degrade it, are to be fought and extirpated. We must secure for
soul-life some fair room and chance as against these pests and tyrants.
Here lies the noblest work of science; here, in prevention rather than in
cure, lies the best field of that unsurpassed profession, the
physician's. And, too, in this preventive work each man must learn to be
his own physician, and minister to himself.

But what, meantime, is our disabled and secluded invalid to do? He is
like a man set to fight a battle with one arm tied behind him. Others
may pity, but for him his disablement must be a motive to greater
exerti