quit that as the former, since he was always pleasing
himself in every condition, by doing little things for the love of God."

"That the goodness of God assured him he would not forsake him utterly,
and that he would give him strength to bear whatever evil he permitted
to happen to him; and, therefore, that he feared nothing, and had no
occasion to consult with anybody about his state. That, when he had
attempted to do it, he had always come away more perplexed."

The simple-heartedness of the good Brother Lawrence, and the relaxation
of all unnecessary solicitudes and anxieties in him, is a refreshing
spectacle.

* * * * *

The need of feeling responsible all the livelong day has been preached
long enough in our New England. Long enough exclusively, at any
rate,--and long enough to the female sex. What our girl-students and
woman-teachers most need nowadays is not the exacerbation, but rather
the toning-down of their moral tensions. Even now I fear that some one
of my fair hearers may be making an undying resolve to become
strenuously relaxed, cost what it will, for the remainder of her life.
It is needless to say that that is not the way to do it. The way to do
it, paradoxical as it may seem, is genuinely not to care whether you are
doing it or not. Then, possibly, by the grace of God, you may all at
once find that you _are_ doing it, and, having learned what the trick
feels like, you may (again by the grace of God) be enabled to go on.

And that something like this may be the happy experience of all my
hearers is, in closing, my most earnest wish.

II. ON A CERTAIN BLINDNESS IN HUMAN BEINGS

Our judgments concerning the worth of things, big or little, depend on
the _feelings_ the things arouse in us. Where we judge a thing to be
precious in consequence of the _idea_ we frame of it, this is only
because the idea is itself associated already with a feeling. If we were
radically feelingless, and if ideas were the only things our mind could
entertain, we should lose all our likes and dislikes at a stroke, and be
unable to point to any one situation or experience in life more valuable
or significant than any other.

Now the blindness in human beings, of which this discourse will treat,
is the blindness with which we all are afflicted in regard to the
feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves.

We are practical beings, each of us with limited functions and d