to have the
power that can come from action, without such resistance. As, for
instance, when we have to train a child with a perverse will, if we
quietly assert what is right to the child, and insist upon obedience
without the slightest antagonistic feeling to the child's naughtiness,
we accomplish much more toward strengthening the character of the child
than if we try to enforce our idea by the use of our personal will,
which is filled with resistance toward the child's obstinacy. In the
latter case, it is just pitting our will against the will of the child,
which is always destructive, however it may appear that we have
succeeded in enforcing the child's obedience. The same thing holds true
in relation to an older person, with the exception that, with him or
her, we cannot even attempt to require obedience. In that case we
must,--when it is necessary that we should speak at all,--assert the
right without antagonism to what we believe to be their wrong, and
without the slightest personal resistance to it. If we follow this
course, in most cases our friend will come to the right point of
view,--sometimes the result seems almost miraculous,--or, as is often
the case, we, because we are wholesomely open-minded, will recognize
any mistake in our own point of view, and will gladly modify it to
agree with that of our friend.

The trouble is that very few of us feel like working to remedy a wrong
merely for the sake of the right, and therefore we must have an impetus
of personal feeling to carry us on toward the work of reformation. If
we could once be strongly started in obedience to the law from love of
the law itself, we should find in that impersonal love a clear light
and power for effective action both in the larger and in the smaller
questions of life.

There is a popular cry against introspection and an insistence that it
is necessarily morbid, which works in direct opposition to true
self-control. Introspection for its own sake is self-centred and
morbid, but we might as well assert that it is right to have dirty
hands so long as we wear gloves, and that it is morbid to want to be
sure that our hands are clean under our gloves, as to assert that
introspection for the sake of our true spiritual freedom is morbid. If
I cannot look at my selfish motives, how am I going to get free from
them? It is my selfish motives that prevent true self-control. It is my
selfish motives that prompt me to the false control of repres