Unwholesome sympathy incapacitates one for serving others, whether the need be physical, mental, or moral.  Wholesome sympathy not only gives us power to serve, but clears our understanding; and, because of our growing ability to appreciate rightly the point of view of other people, our service can be more and more intelligent.

In contrast to this unwholesome sympathy, which is the cause of more trouble in the world than people generally suppose, is the unwholesome lack of sympathy, or hardening process, which is deliberately cultivated by many people, and which another story will serve to illustrate.

A poor negro was once brought to the hospital very ill; he had suffered so keenly in the process of getting there that the resulting weakness, together with the intense fright at the idea of being in a hospital, which is so common to many of his class, added to the effects of his disease itself, were too much for him, and he died before he had been in bed fifteen minutes.  The nurse in charge looked at him and said, in a cold, steady tone:—­

“It was hardly worth while to make up the bed.”

She had hardened herself because she could not endure the suffering of unwholesome sympathy, and yet “must do her work.”  No one had taught her the freedom and power of true sympathy.  Her finer senses were dulled and atrophied,—­she did not know the difference between one human soul and another.  She only knew that this was a case of typhoid fever, that a case of pneumonia, and another a case of delirium tremens.  They were all one to her, so far as the human beings went.  She knew the diagnosis and the care of the physical disease,—­and that was all.  She did the material work very well, but she must have brought torture to the sensitive mind in many a poor, sick body.

Another form of false sympathy is what may be called professional sympathy.  Some people never find that out, but admire and get comfort from the professional sympathy of a doctor or a nurse, or any other person whose profession it is to care for those who are suffering.  It takes a keen perception or a quick emergency to bring out the false ring of professional sympathy.  But the hardening process that goes on in the professional sympathizer is even greater than in the case of those who do not put on a sympathetic veneer.  It seems as if there must be great tension in the more delicate parts of the nervous system in people who have hardened themselves, with or without the veneer,—­akin to what there would be in the muscles if a man went about his work with both fists tightly clenched all day, and slept with them clenched all night.  If that tension of hard indifference could be reached and relaxed, the result would probably be a nervous collapse, before true, wholesome habits could be established. but unfortunately it often becomes so rigid that a healthy relaxation is out of the question.  Professional sympathy is of the same quality as the selfish sympathy which we see constantly about us in men or women who sympathize because the emotion attracts admiration and wins the favor of others.