If they could only know
how great a gift their sensitiveness is! To appreciate this, it must
be used to find and feel the good in others, not to make us
abnormally alive to real or fancied slights. We must use it to
enlarge our sympathies and help us understand the wrong-doing of
others enough to point the way, if possible, to better things, not
merely to criticise and blame them. Only in such ways can we learn
to realize and use the delicate power of sensitiveness. Selfish
sensitiveness is a blessing turned to a curse; but the more lovingly
sensitive we become to the need of moral freedom in our friends, the
Dearer we are led to our own.
There are no human relations that do not illustrate the law which
bids me "love my neighbor as myself;" especially clearly is it
revealed,--in its breach of observance,--in the comparatively
external relations of host and guest in ordinary social life, and in
the happiness that can be given and received when it is readily
obeyed.
A lady once said, "I go into my bedroom and take note of all the
conveniences I have there, and then look about my guest chamber to
see that it is equally well and appropriately furnished." She
succeeds in her object in the guest chamber if she is the kind of
hostess to her guest that she would have her guest be to her; not
that her guest's tastes are necessarily her own, but that she knows
how to find out what they are and how to satisfy them.
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