ck, or even ruined, by his quickness to take offense, or to
resent a fancied slight. There is many a clergyman, well educated and
able, who is so sensitive that he can not keep a pastorate long. From
his distorted viewpoint some brother or sister in the church is always
hurting him, saying and thinking unkind things, or throwing out hints
and suggestions calculated to injure him in the eyes of the
congregation.

Many schoolteachers are great sufferers from over-sensitiveness.
Remarks of parents, or school committees, or little bits of gossip
which are reported to them make them feel as if people were sticking
pins in them, metaphorically speaking, all the time. Writers, authors,
and other people with artistic temperaments, are usually very
sensitive. I have in mind a very strong, vigorous editorial writer who
is so prone to take offense that he can not hold a position either on a
magazine or a daily paper. He is cut to the very quick by the
slightest criticism, and regards every suggestion for the improvement
of his work as a personal affront. He always carries about an injured
air, a feeling that he has been imposed upon, which greatly detracts
from an otherwise agreeable personality.

The great majority of people, no matter how rough in manner or bearing,
are kind-hearted, and would much rather help than hinder a fellowbeing,
but they have all they can do to attend to their own affairs, and have
no time to spend in minutely analyzing the nature and feeling of those
whom they meet in the course of their daily business. In the busy
world of affairs, it is give and take, touch and go, and those who
expect to get on must rid themselves of all morbid sensitiveness. If
they do not, they doom themselves to unhappiness and failure.

Self-consciousness is a foe to greatness in every line of endeavor. No
one ever does a really great thing until he feels that he is a part of
something greater than himself, until he surrenders to that greater
principle.

Some of our best writers never found themselves, never touched their
power, until they forgot their rules for construction, their grammar,
their rhetorical arrangement, by losing themselves in their subject.
Then they found their style.

It is when a writer is so completely carried away with his subject that
he cannot help writing, that he writes naturally. He shows what his
real style is.

No orator has ever electrified an audience while he was thinking of his