need to study deeply into the laws of health, but simply to
obey those we know. This obedience will lead to our knowing more laws
and knowing them better, and it will in time become a very simple
matter to distinguish the right care from the wrong, and to get a
living sense of how power increases with the one, and decreases with
the other.

XVIII.

OUR RELATIONS WITH OTHERS

EVERY one will admit that our relations to others should be quiet and
clear, in order to give us freedom for our work. Indeed, to make these
relations quiet and happy is the special work that some of us have to
do. There are laws for health, laws for gaining and keeping normal
nerves, laws for honest, kindly action toward others,--but the
obedience to all these is a dead obedience, and does not lead to
vigorous life, unless accompanied by a hearty love for work and play
with those to whom we stand in natural relations,--both young and old.
It is with life as it is with art, what we do must be done with love,
or it will have no force. Without the living spark of love, we may have
the appearance, but never the spirit, of useful work or quiet content.
Stagnation is not peace, and there can be no life, and so no living
peace, without happy relations with those about us.

The more we realize the practical strength of the law which bids us
love our neighbor as ourselves, and the more we act upon it, the more
quickly we gain the habit of pleasant, patient friendliness, which
sooner or later may beget the same friendliness in return. In this kind
of friendly relation there is a savor which so surpasses the unhealthy
snap of disagreement, that any one who truly finds it will soon feel
the fallacy of the belief that "between friends there must be a little
quarrelling, to give spice to friendship."

To be willing that every one should be himself, and work out his
salvation in his own way, seems to be the first principle of the
working plan drawn from the law of loving your neighbor as yourself. If
we drop all selfish resistance to the ways of others, however wrong or
ignorant they may be, we are more free to help them to better ways when
they turn to us for help. It is in pushing and being pushed that we
feel most strain in all human relations.

We wait willingly for the growth of plants, and do not complain, or try
in abnormal ways to force them to do what is entirely contrary to the
laws of nature; and if we paid more attention to the laws of