Character and Conduct Part 15

Lord AVEBURY.

"What man goes worthily through sorrow and does not come out hating shams and pretences, hungering for truth; and also full of sympathy for his fellow-man whose capacity for suffering has been revealed to him by his own?"

PHILLIPS BROOKS.

Hypochondriacs

MARCH 31--APRIL 1

"There is a temperament called _Hypochondriac_, to which many persons, some of them the brightest, the most interesting, the most gifted, are born heirs,--a want of balance of the nervous powers, which tends constantly to periods of high excitement and of consequent depression,--an unfortunate inheritance for the possessor, though accompanied often with the greatest talents....

"People of this temperament are subject to fits of gloom and despondency, of nervous irritability and suffering, which darken the aspect of the whole world to them, which present lying reports of their friends, of themselves, of the circ.u.mstances of their life, and of all with which they have to do.

"Now the highest philosophy for persons thus afflicted is to understand themselves and their tendencies, to know that these fits of gloom and depression are just as much a form of disease as a fever or a toothache,--to know that it is the peculiarity of the disease to fill the mind with wretched illusions, to make them seem miserable and unlovely to themselves, to make their nearest friends seem unjust and unkind, to make all events appear to be going wrong and tending to destruction and ruin.

"The evils and burdens of such a temperament are half removed when a man once knows that he has it, and recognises it for a disease,--when he does not trust himself to speak and act in those bitter hours as if there were any truth in what he thinks and feels and sees. He who has not attained to this wisdom overwhelms his friends and his family with the waters of bitterness; he stings with unjust accusations, and makes his fireside dreadful with fancies which are real to him, but false as the ravings of fever.

"A sensible person, thus diseased, who has found out what ails him, will shut his mouth resolutely, not to give utterance to the dark thoughts that infest his soul.

"A lady of great brilliancy and wit, who was subject to these periods, once said to me, 'My dear sir, there are times when I know I am possessed of the Devil, and then I never let myself speak.' And so this wise woman carried her burden about with her in a determined, cheerful reticence, leaving always the impression of a cheery, kindly temper, when, if she had spoken out a t.i.the of what she thought and felt in her morbid hours, she would have driven all her friends from her, and made others as miserable as she was herself. She was a sunbeam, a life-giving presence in every family, by the power of self-knowledge and self-control."

_Little Foxes_, HARRIET BEECHER STOWE.

"Comfort's Art"

APRIL 2

"It would be very petty of us who are well and can bear things, to think much of small offences from those who carry a weight of trial."

GEORGE ELIOT.

"Trouble is so hard to bear, is it not? How can we live and think that any one has trouble--piercing trouble--and we could help them and never try?"

GEORGE ELIOT.

"Pity makes the world soft to the weak and n.o.ble for the strong."

_The Light of Asia_, E. ARNOLD.

"Ask G.o.d to give thee skill For comfort's art, That thou may'st consecrated be, And set apart Unto a life of sympathy!

For heavy is the weight of ill For every heart, And comforters are needed much Of Christlike touch."

Irritability

APRIL 3

"Irritability is, more than most unlovely states, a sin of the flesh. It is not, like envy, malice, spite, revenge, a vice which we may suppose to belong equally to an embodied or a disembodied spirit: in fact, it comes nearer to being physical depravity than anything I know of. There are some bodily states, some conditions of the nerves, such that we could not conceive of even an angelic spirit, confined in a body thus disordered, as being able to do any more than simply endure. It is a state of nervous torture; and the attacks which the wretched victim makes on others are as much a result of disease as the snapping and biting of a patient convulsed with hydrophobia.... I think it is undeniable that the peace and happiness of the home-circle are very generally much invaded by the recurrence in its members of these states of bodily irritability. Every person, if he thinks the matter over, will see that his condition in life, the character of his friends, his estimate of their virtues and failings, his hopes and expectations, are all very much modified by these things. Cannot we all remember going to bed as very ill-used, persecuted individuals, all whose friends were unreasonable, whose life was full of trials and crosses, and waking up on a bright bird-singing morning to find all these illusions gone with the fogs of the night? Our friends are nice people, after all; the little things that annoyed us look ridiculous by bright suns.h.i.+ne; and we are fortunate individuals."

_Little Foxes_, HARRIET BEECHER STOWE.

Irritability

APRIL 4

"The philosophy of life, then, as far as this matter is concerned, must consist of two things: first, to keep ourselves out of irritable bodily states; and, second, to understand and control these states, when we cannot ward them off. Of course, the first of these is the most important; and yet, of all things, it seems to be least looked into and understood. We find abundant rules for the government of the tongue and temper; it is a slough into which, John Bunyan hath it, cartloads of wholesome instructions have been thrown; but how to get and keep that healthy state of brain, stomach, and nerves which takes away the temptation to ill-temper and anger is a subject which moral and religious teachers seem scarcely to touch upon.... We have a common saying, that this or that person is soon used up. Now most nervous, irritable states of temper are the mere physical result of a used-up condition. The person has overspent his nervous energy,--like a man who should eat up on Monday the whole food which was to keep him for a week, and go growling and faint through the other days; or the quant.i.ty of nervous force which was wanted to carry on the whole system in all its parts is seized on by some one monopolising portion, and used up to the loss and detriment of the rest."

_Little Foxes_, HARRIET BEECHER STOWE.

Accidie

APRIL 5

"... 'Accidie,' the spiritual sloth, which we rechristen 'depression'

and 'low spirits,' and meet with sympathy! Dante met it by fixing its victims in the mire beneath the water, where they keep gurgling in their throats the confession--

'We sullen were In the sweet air, which by the sun is gladdened, Bearing within ourselves the sluggish reek; Now we are sullen in this sable mire.'"

_Stray Thoughts on Reading_, LUCY SOULSBY.

"A dull day need not be a depressing day; depression always implies physical or moral weakness, and is therefore never to be tolerated so long as one can struggle against it."

HAMILTON W. MABIE.

Accidie

APRIL 6

"... The sin of accidie, which is 'a sorrowfulness so weighing down the mind that there is no good it likes to do. It has attached to it as its inseparable comrade a distress and weariness of soul, and a sluggishness in all good works, which plunges the whole man into lazy languor, and works in him a constant bitterness. And out of this vehement woe springs silence and a flagging of the voice, because the soul is so absorbed and taken up with its own indolent dejection, that it has no energy for utterance, but is cramped, and hampered, and imprisoned in its own confused bewilderment, and has not a word to say.'"

_The Spirit of Discipline_, Bishop PAGET.

"Try it for a day, I beseech you, to preserve yourself in an easy and cheerful frame of mind. Compare the day in which you have rooted out the weed of dissatisfaction with that on which you have allowed it to grow up, and you will find your heart open to every good motive, your life strengthened and your breast armed with a panoply against every trick of fate; truly, you will wonder at your own improvement."

RICHTER.