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34 BYWAYS TO BLESSEDNESS

and the lowest creature is not separated from the highest but by greater weakness, by lesser
intelligence. When we pity and protect we reveal and enlarge the divine life and joy within
ourselves. When we thoughtlessly or callously inflict suffering or destroy, then our divine life
becomes obscured, and its joy fades and dies. Bodies may feed bodies, and passions passions, but
man’s divine nature is only nurtured, sustained, and developed by kindness, love, sympathy, and
all pure and unselfish acts.
By bestowing sympathy on others we increase our own. Sympathy given can never be wasted.
Even the meanest creature will respond to its heavenly touch, for it is the universal language
which all creatures understand. I have recently heard a true story of a Dartmoor convict whose
terms of incarceration in various convict stations extended to over forty years. As a criminal he
was considered one of the most callous and hopelessly abandoned, and the warders found him

almost intractable. But one day he caught a mouse — a weak, terrified, hunted thing like himself
— and its helpless frailty, and the similarity of its condition with his own, appealed to him, and
started into flame the divine spark of sympathy which smouldered in his crime-hardened heart,
and which no human touch had ever wakened into life.
He kept the mouse in an old boot in his cell, fed, tended, and loved it, and in his love for the
weak and helpless he forgot and lost his hatred for the strong. His heart and his hand were no
longer against his fellows. He became tractable and obedient to the uttermost. The warders could
not understand his change; it seemed to them little short of miraculous that this most hardened of
all criminals should suddenly be transformed into the likeness of a gentle, obedient child. Even the
expression of his features altered remarkably: a pleasing smile began to play around the mouth
which had formerly been moved to nothing better than a cruel grin, and the implacable hardness
of his eyes disappeared and gave place to a soft, deep, mellow light. The criminal was a criminal no
longer; he was saved, converted; clothed, and in his right mind; restored to humaneness and to
humanity, and set firmly on the pathway to divinity by pitying and caring for a defenceless
creature. All this was made known to the warders shortly afterwards, when, on his discharge, he
took the mouse away with him.
Thus sympathy bestowed increases its store in our own hearts, and enriches and fructifies our
own life. Sympathy given is blessedness received; sympathy withheld is blessedness forfeited. In
the measure that a man increases and enlarges his sympathy so much nearer does he approach
the ideal life, the perfect blessedness; and when his heart has become so mellowed that no hard,
bitter, or cruel thought can enter and detract from its permanent sweetness, then indeed is he
richly and divinely blessed.