Even with the best of our philosophy we who are well are unable to command at will the feelings of those who are ill.  We lie on a bed, racked with the pains of some passing affliction, and the chasm which separates us from the hale and hearty seems prodigious.  We are led down the stairs, out into the sunlight.  The very rays themselves sit heavily upon our shoulders, and nearly crush us to the earth.  With those vivid impressions of the terrors of illness, we feel that our brains will remain steeped in memories such as will enable us to appreciate our health if we ever get it again, yea, though we have hardly a crust of bread to spare.  But lo! behold us once well again, and we have forgotten our good fortune; at the slightest turn in our personal affairs we bemoan our fate as sharply as though the whole night had been rolling in upon us through some fever, or all the blasts of the arctic world had crept through our bones in some frigid chill.  There is no boon so great as health.  Of course everybody admits that.  But why can we not attach meaning to it?  If a man rise in a public gathering and say “I will give a hundred dollars!” he knows exactly what he is saying, and so do his hearers know.  But if he rise behind a pulpit or on a rostrum and say

“PRESERVE YOUR HEALTH

at all hazards!” no significance so deep attaches, though the one statement is a thousand times as important as the other.  I cannot understand why we are so oblivious to the sufferings of illness while we are well unless it be a provision of nature to keep us from that suffering through sympathy which we would surely undergo if we really had any vivid feeling for the sick.  On this earth each one has to do his own suffering—­the King in the palace of the royal family and the baby in the hut of the miner.  All who are well go their way rejoicing, even having no momentary realization of the state of mind of the disabled associate.  It may be that this has not always been so, for we inherit a salutation among our other traits which implies a desire to be informed as to the physical condition of the body of the person addressed.  Two men of affairs meet.  One says: 

“HOW ARE YE?”

The other responds:  “How are ye?  Are you going to be at the meeting to-night?” etc., the conversation being now under full headway.  The words indicate that, at one time, they carried a meaning which they have lost.  Yet we are not worse than our fathers before us, and are not exceeded in the milk of human kindness.  It may be that the old form was such a cumbrous piece of hypocrisy that latter-day people have thrown it off in disgust.  Anyway, there is nothing more certain nor more astonishing than that a well man cannot conceive the feelings of a sick man, even though he try, and that those who are sick have to grin and bear it all without any very great affliction falling to the lot of those who stand at the bedside.