"--a disease which, in spite of its innocent name, is one of the gravest
sources of restlessness in the world. Touchiness, when it becomes
chronic, is a morbid condition of the inward disposition. It is
self-love inflamed to the acute point; conceit, _with a hair-trigger._
The cure is to shift the yoke to some other place; to let men and things
touch us through some new and perhaps as yet unused part of our nature;
to become meek and lowly in heart while the old nature is becoming numb
from want of use. It is the beautiful work of Christianity everywhere to
adjust the burden of life to those who bear it, and them to it. It has
a perfectly miraculous gift of healing. Without doing any violence
to human nature it sets it right with life, harmonizing it with all
surrounding things, and restoring those who are jaded with the fatigue
and dust of the world to a new grace of living. In the mere matter of
altering the perspective of life and changing the proportions of things,
its function in lightening the care of man is altogether its own. The
weight of a load depends upon the attraction of the earth. But suppose
the attraction of the earth were removed? A ton on some other planet,
where the attraction of gravity is less, does not weigh half a ton. Now
Christianity removes the attraction of the earth; and this is one way
in which it diminishes men's burden. It makes them citizens of another
world. What was a ton yesterday is not half a ton to-day. So without
changing one's circumstances, merely by offering a wider horizon and a
different standard, it alters the whole aspect of the world.

Christianity as Christ taught is the truest philosophy of life ever
spoken. But let us be quite sure when we speak of Christianity that we
mean Christ's Christianity. Other versions are either caricatures,
or exaggerations, or misunderstandings, or shortsighted and surface
readings. For the most part their attainment is hopeless and the results
wretched. But I care not who the person is, or through what vale of