Page:The Art of Helping People Out of Trouble (1924).pdf/243

 To have grasped this lesson is to have made a beginning of learning the art of helping. We are continually seeking the immediate. We search for panaceas and we want instantaneous change. In a few days we would make different a human being who for three or four decades has been evolving to what heis. Yet if the body develops so slowly that in age one can recognize the youth, how can we expect greater rapidity in the transformation of personality which must express itself through the body and which is influenced by it.

Unfortunately, our very books contribute to the illusion that change in man is an easy and an expeditious process. When in three or four hundred pages the biography of a lifetime may be reviewed, the years themselves seem to take on a kind of cinematographic speed and unconsciously we come to expect the same instantaneous development in the people about us. The illustrations that have been used in the preceding pages may each have required a very few moments for the reading, but they represent for the most part months and years of effort. Moreover, these stories are cross-sections. They are not the whole life. The necessity of describing the application of a principle has placed an emphasis upon one in-