stance_

A MAN once grasped a very hot poker with his hand, and although he
cried out with pain, held on to the poker. His friend called out to him
to drop it, whereupon the man indignantly cried out the more.

"Drop it? How can you expect me to think of dropping it with pain like
this? I tell you when a man is suffering, as I am, he can think of
nothing but the pain."

And the more indignant he was, the tighter he held on to the poker, and
the more he cried out with pain.

This story in itself is ridiculous, but it is startlingly true as an
illustration of what people are doing every day.

There is an instinct in us to drop every hot poker at once; and
probably we should be able to drop any other form of unnecessary
disagreeable sensation as soon as possible, if we had not lost that
wholesome instinct through want of use. As it is, we must learn to
re-acquire the lost faculty by the deliberate use of our intelligence
and will.

It is as if we had lost our freedom and needed to be shown the way back
to it, step by step. The process is slow but very interesting, if we
are in earnest; and when, after wandering in the bypaths, we finally
strike the true road, we find our lost faculty waiting for us, and all
that we have learned in reaching it is so much added power.

But at present we are dealing in the main with a world which has no
suspicion of such instincts or faculties as these, and is suffering
along in blind helplessness. A man will drop a hot poker as soon as he
feels it burn, but he will tighten his muscles and hold on to a cold in
his head so persistently that he only gets rid of it at all because
nature is stronger than he is, and carries it off in spite of him.

How common it is to see a woman entirely wrapped up, with a
handkerchief held to her nose,--the whole body as tense as it can
be,--wondering "Why does it take so long to get rid of this cold?" To
get free from a severe cold there should be open and clear circulation
throughout the whole body. The more the circulation is impeded, the
longer the cold will last. To begin with, the cold itself impedes the
circulation; and if, in addition, we offer resistance to the very idea
of having a cold, we tighten our nerves and our bodies and thereby
impede our circulation still further. It is curious that the more we
resist a cold the more we hold on to it, but it is a very evident fact;
and so is its logical corollary, that the less we resist it the soon