spectacular appeals or only to those that we have examined and found
good? Do we put the spiritual interests of humanity first? Is there any
appreciable amount of quiet spontaneous giving which is known to no one?
Do we prefer to be anonymous? Such tests soon reveal what we are like.
One who never gives spontaneously, without being asked, we may be sure
is lacking in sympathy.

But of course one does not mean that sympathy is so closely related to
what we call charity as what I have just said, if left by itself, would
seem to imply. That is indeed the common form assumed by sympathy which
has to be called out. But the best type of sympathy is the expression of
our knowledge of one another; it is based on our knowledge of human
nature and our interest in human beings. Because it is based on
knowledge it is not subject to be swept away by the sweet breezes of
sentimentalism. To its perfect exercise it is needful to know
individuals not merely to know about them. The ordinary limitations of
sympathy come from this, that we do not want to take time and pains to
know one another. That, for example, is where the Church falls short in
its mission to constitute a real brotherhood among its members--they
have no time nor inclination really to know one another, or they find
the artificial walls that society has erected impassable. It is, in
fact, not very easy to know one another, and it is impossible to develop
the complete type of sympathy with a crowd. For one must insist that
this highest type of sympathy requires, what the word actually does
mean, mutual sharing in life, the participation in the lives of our
fellows and their partaking in our lives.

So we understand why perfect sympathy is conditioned on spirituality.
Unless we are spiritually developed and spiritually at one we cannot
share in one another's lives fully. Where there are lives separated by a