do not know us, but that is a very imperfect rendering of the perfect
thing. No more than love does sympathy reach its perfection in solitude.
But here in this village of Judah we know that we have the perfect
thing--sympathy in its most exquisite form.

This capacity for sympathy is one of the greatest of human endowments,
and, one is glad to think, not like many human endowments, rare in its
manifestation. In its ordinary manifestation it is instinctive, is
roused by the spectacle of need calling us to its aid. There come to our
knowledge from time to time instances of what seem to us very grievous
failures in sympathy, but investigation shows that ignorance is very
commonly at the bottom of them. When human beings are convinced of a
need they are quite ready to respond. Indeed this readiness to respond
makes them the easy victims of all sorts of impostures, of baseless
appeals which play upon sentiment rather than convince the
understanding. And just there lies the weakness of sympathy in that it
is so easily turned to sentimentality. But the sentimentalist who gushes
over ills, real or imaginary, can commonly be brought to book easily
enough. For one thing the sentimentalist is devoted to publicity. He
loves to conduct campaigns and drives, to "get up" a demonstration or an
entertainment. I do not mean that he is a hypocrite but only that he
loves the lime-light. When any tragedy befalls man his impulse is to
organise a dance in aid of it. It is extraordinary how many people there
are who will aid a charity by dancing to whom one would feel it quite
hopeless to appeal for the amount of the dance tickets. And yet they are
not wholly selfish people; there does lie back of the dance a certain
sympathetic impulse. We easily deceive ourselves about ourselves, and it
is well to be sure that we have true sympathy and not just sentiment. It
is not so difficult to find out. We can test ourselves quickly enough by
examining our giving. Do we give only when we are asked? Do we yield to