cried out with pain, held on to the poker. His friend called out to
him to drop it, whereupon the man indignantly cried out the more.

"Drop it? How can you expect me to think of dropping it with pain
like this? I tell you when a man is suffering, as I am, he can think
of nothing but the pain."

And the more indignant he was, the tighter he held on to the poker,
and the more he cried out with pain.

This story in itself is ridiculous, but it is startlingly true as an
illustration of what people are doing every day.

There is an instinct in us to drop every hot poker at once; and
probably we should be able to drop any other form of unnecessary
disagreeable sensation as soon as possible, if we had not lost that
wholesome instinct through want of use. As it is, we must learn to
re-acquire the lost faculty by the deliberate use of our
intelligence and will.

It is as if we had lost our freedom and needed to be shown the way
back to it, step by step. The process is slow but very interesting,
if we are in earnest; and when, after wandering in the bypaths, we
finally strike the true road, we find our lost faculty waiting for
us, and all that we have learned in reaching it is so much added
power.

But at present we are dealing in the main with a world which has no
suspicion of such instincts or faculties as these, and is suffering
along in blind helplessness. A man will drop a hot poker as soon as