AS OTHERS SEE US

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIV, 24 February 1931, Page 6

AS OTHERS SEE US

THE TRUE KNOWLEDGE "You sometimes feci what a good thing it would he if some of your acquaintances could learn the truth about themselves,” writes the Rev. J. C. Hardwick, in the London ‘‘Evening News.” “Perhaps von yourself would not mind being the means whereby that truth was conveyed to them; there would he a certain satisfaction in veracity on such occasions. However, even if you were to make a careful anil accurate statement of the truth about himself to your friend, your time would almost certainly be wasted, for lie would not believe it. Few of us, I think, really want to know the truth about ourselves; we prefer the opinion wo may have formed, and which we fondly imagine other people to hold. Yet, do yon never wake up at three o’clock in the morning with an indefinable sense of depression —a feeling of knowing the truth, the lamentable truth, about yourself? in tlie old days they would have called it a ‘sense of sin,’ hut as we no longer believe in any such thing, we do not quite know what to make of it. Yet there it is; the humbug all falls away, ami we feel rather as if we were walking about without clothes in a welldressed crowd. I suppose that during sleep the subconscious part of our mind Is active; and it is deep down in this region, well buried during hours of daylight, that the true knowledge of ourselves lurks. Fortunately, the mood does not last; by morning we are as perky and self-deceived as ever.”