Or have we, through unselfish and self-forgetting labor for the advancement of all, grown up to a broader outlook on life, a more tolerant eye for the shortcomings of others and a wider charity for humanity everywhere? Only by losing ourselves do we find our best selves. There are so many things we can do to brighten the life-path for others, and almost without effort on our part. A kind word, a helpful suggestion, a pleasant smile in answer to a cross look; these cost nothing, and if we cultivate the habit we shall carry them unconsciously wherever we go; and they often mean so much.
There is the sister who comes from a home where the most rigid economy must be practiced, or where the children, dear as they are, wear on overworked nerves and brain; where death has brought havoc and desolation; where the husband is surly and penurious; where scandal or disgrace has been, or where sorrows worse than death have brought darkness and continual heartache. Do you think it does not matter to such whether you give them cordial greeting, whether your presence is like the blessed sunlight, whether your life of un-self-conscious faith and hope beams across their way, even for a half hour? How seldom it occurs to any of us to ask ourselves what is our real, unconscious influence among our sisters.
Somebody has said that to be warped unconsciously by the magnetic influence of all around is the destiny of even the greatest souls. If this is true, how much more is it likely that we common souls shall be swayed by outside spiritual forces. Let us see to it that we are not like Hosea Bigelow’s character who
“Might be a marvel of easy delightfulness
If he would not sometimes leave the r out of sprightfulness.”
Let us, also, recall Dorothea’s motto in “Middlemarch”:
“I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me, that by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we do not know what it is, and cannot do what we would, we are a part of the divine power against evil, widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.”
A good motto for us all, isn’t it?