Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/369

 and it were better to retire than to be dismissed.

"But I thought you didn't mind criticism?" a man said to me one day. "I always supposed that after a while one became callous."

My dear friend Bishop Williams of Detroit was at the table, and I shall ever be grateful to him for the smile of instant comprehension and sympathy with which he illuminated the reply he made before I had time to speak.

"Yes, callous," he remarked, "or—raw."

It was precisely that. There were those who were always saying to me: "I know you don't mind what they say about you, but I never could stand it; I'm too sensitive." It was a daily experience, almost as difficult to endure as the visits of those who came to report the latest ill-natured comment; they did it because they were friends and felt that I should know it. But Bishop Williams knows life and understands human nature more completely and more tolerantly than any clergyman I ever knew.

And then politics have the dreadful effect of beating all the freshness out of a man; if they do not make him timid, they make him hesitant and cautious, provident of his opinion; he goes about with his finger on his lips, fearful of utterance, and, when he does speak, it is in guarded syllables which conceal his true thought; he cultivates solemnity and the meretricious art of posing; humor is to be avoided, since the crowd is perplexed by humor and so resents it, and will have only the stale rudimentary wit of those stories which men, straining to be funny, match at the banquet board. And when he