can be changed, instead of changing it, is the height of folly, and if
a matter cannot be changed why worry over it? How utterly useless is
the worry. Then, too, worry is the parent of nagging. Nagging is
worry put into words,--the verbal expression of worry about or towards
individuals. The mother wishes her son would do differently. Can the
boy's actions be changed? Then go to work to change them--not to worry
over them. If they cannot be changed, why nag him, why irritate him,
why make a bad matter worse? Nagging, like worry, never once did one
iota of good; it has caused infinite harm, as it sets up an irritation
between those whose love might overcome the difficulty if it were let
alone. Nagging is the constant irritation of a wound, the rubbing of
a sore, the salting an abraded place, the giving a hungry man a tract,
religious advice or a bible, when all he craves is food.

Ah, mother! many a boy has run away from home because your worry led
you to nag him; many a girl to-day is on the streets because father
or mother nagged her; many a husband has "gone on a tear" because he
could not face his wife's "worry put into words," even though no one
would attempt to deny that boy, girl and husband alike were wrong
_in every particular_, and the "nagger" in the right, save in the one
thing of worry and its consequent nagging.

In watching the lives of men and women I have been astonished, again
and again, that the fruitlessness of their worry did not demonstrate
its uselessness to them. No good ever comes from it. Everybody who has
any perception sees this, agrees to it, confesses it. Then why still
persist in it? Yet they do, and at the same time expect to be regarded
as intelligent, sane, normal human beings, many of whom claim, as
members of churches, peculiar and close kinship with God, forgetful of
the fact that every moment spent in worry is dishonoring to God.