POWER OF IDEAS IN THE SICK-ROOM.

“Sunt homines qui cum patientiâ moriuntur: sunt autem quidam perfecti qui cum patientiâ vivunt.”St. Augustin.

“No cruel guard of diligent cares, that keepCrowned woes awake, as things too wise for sleep:But reverend discipline, religious fear,And soft obedience find sweet biding here!The self-remembering soul sweetly recoversHer kindred with the stars: not basely hoversBelow—but meditates the immortal wayHome to the source of light and intellectual day.”Crashaw.

“No cruel guard of diligent cares, that keepCrowned woes awake, as things too wise for sleep:But reverend discipline, religious fear,And soft obedience find sweet biding here!

The self-remembering soul sweetly recoversHer kindred with the stars: not basely hoversBelow—but meditates the immortal wayHome to the source of light and intellectual day.”Crashaw.

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Wehear, every day, benevolent and compassionate persons, in discussing the woes of sufferers, dwelling on the thought of such sufferers becoming inured; and we see them, if possible, reposing on this as the closing and conclusive idea. How natural this is! How often and how undoubtingly we did it ourselves, in our days of ease! But how differently it sounds now! How quickly do we detect in it the discharge and dismissal of uneasy sympathies! How infallibly do we see how far it may be true; and what a tale could we tell of what is included in the phrase, “becoming inured,” where it may be most truly applied! of whatexperience is involved in the process, where it is shortest and easiest!

I was lately speaking to a tender-hearted woman, who had known suffering, but not torment, of more than one case of persons who, dying slowly under a torturing disease, simply and naturally declared, shortly before death, the season of their illness to have been the happiest part of their lives. There are different ways of explaining this fact, which, though I always believed it, I did not till lately understand. My friend, however, found no difficulty. She said, in a tone of pitying tenderness, but of perfect decision, “O! they become inured to it.” I replied by some slight description of the suffering in the case which had impressed me most, and asked if she thought use and experience could soften pain like that. “O yes,” she again said, “they become inured to it. That is certainly the thing.”

Is it so? I am persuaded it is not. To the great majority of evils men may become inured; but not to all. To almost every kind, and to vast degrees of privation, moral and physical, they may become inured; and to chronic sufferings of mind and body; but I am convinced that there is nomore possibility of becoming inured to acute agony of body than to paroxysms of remorse—the severest of moral pains. For the sake of both sufferers and sympathisers, it would be well that this should be thoroughly understood, that aid may not fall short, nor relief be looked for in the wrong direction.

The truth is, as all will declare who are subject to a frequently recurring pain, a familiar pain becomes more and more dreaded, instead of becoming lightly esteemed in proportion to its familiarity. The general sense of alarm which it probably occasioned when new, may have given way and disappeared before a knowledge of consequences, and a regular method of management or endurance; but the pain itself becomes more odious, more oppressive, more feared, in proportion to the accumulation of experience of weary hours, in proportion to the aggregate of painful associations which every visitation revives. When it is, moreover, considered that the suffering part of the body is, if not recovering, growing continually more diseased and susceptible of pain, it will appear how little truth there is in the supposition of tortured persons becoming inured to torture.

The inuring process which I hold to beimpossible in the cases mentioned is, however, practicable and frequent in almost all cases of inferior suffering. But, while all join in thanking God for this, there is a wide difference in the view taken of the fact by those who feel and those who only observe it. To the last, it is a clear and satisfactory truth, shining on the rock of futurity, which they can sit and gaze at from the window of their ease, commenting on the blessing of such a beacon-light to those who need it. To those who need it, meanwhile, it is far far off—sometimes hidden and sometimes despaired of, as the waves and the billows go over them, and the point can be reached only through sinkings and struggles, and fears and anguish, with scanty breathing-times between. Why is this not admitted in the case of the invalid as it is in that of the person losing a sense? One who is becoming blind or deaf is sure to grow inured in time; but through what a series of keen mortifications, of bitter privations! Every one sees and understands this; while in the case of the invalid, many spring to the conclusion, overlooking the process of discipline which has, in that case, as in the other, to be undergone. It should never be forgotten how different a thing itis to read off this lesson from the clear print of assertion or observation, and to learn it experimentally, at a scarcely perceptible rate, “line upon line and precept upon precept;” when every line is burnt in by pain, and the long series of precepts are registered by their degrees of anguish.

When the nature of the process has been sufficiently dwelt upon to be understood—that the hearts of the happy may be duly softened, and those of the suffering duly cheered by sympathy—then let all good be said of the inuring process; at least all the good that is true; and that is much. No wise man will declare that it is the best and healthiest condition for any one. No wise man will deny that the healthiest moral condition is found where there is the most abundant happiness. Happiness is clearly the native, heavenly atmosphere of the soul—that in which it is “to live and move and have its being” hereafter, and in proportion to its share of which, now and here, it makes its heavenly growth. The divinest souls—the loftiest, most disinterested and devoted—all unite in one testimony, that they have been best when happiest; that they were then most energetic and spontaneously devoted—least self-conscious.This must and may joyfully be granted. But, as the mystery of evil is all round about us, as we have no choice whether or not to suffer, we may be freely thankful next for the inuring process, as being the possible means, though inferior to happiness, of divine ends.

Far, indeed, does the sufferer feel from reaching those ends, when he contrasts his own state with that of the truly happy man. When he looks upon one so “little lower than the angels,” on his frame, so nerved and graced by health, his eye emitting the glow of the soul, his voice uttering the music of the heart, his hand strong to effect his purposes, his head erect in the liberty of ease, his intellect and soul free from perplexities and cares, and not only at leisure for the service of others, but restless to impart to them of his own overflowing good; when the sufferer contemplates such a being, and contrasts him with himself, he may well feel how much he has to do, to approach this higher order of his race. Aware of his own internal tremblings at the touch of the familiar pain, sinking in weakness before the bare idea of enterprise, abashed by self-consciousness, smarting under tenderness of conscience, perplexed andbewildered by the intricacy and vastness of human woe, of which his own suffering gives him too keen a sense, well may he who is in the bonds of pain look up humbly to him who walks gloriously in joy; and the humility might sink into abjectness if the matter ended here, if the inuring process were not at work. But herein is ample ground for hope now, and greatness in the future; and if a secondary, still a sufficient greatness.

The sufferer may well be satisfied, and needs be abashed before no mortal, if he obtains, sooner or later, the power to achieve divine ends through the experience of his lot. If, beginning by encountering his familiar pain, and putting down the dread of it by looking merely to the comfort of the reaction when it ceases, he attains at length to conquering pain by the power of ideas; if, ease of body being out of the question, he makes activity of spirit suffice him; if, his own future in this life being a blank, he becomes absorbed in that of other men; if, imprisoned by disease, kingdoms and races are not wide enough for his sympathies; if, as this or that sense is extinguished, or this or that limb is laid fast, his spirit becomes more alive in every faculty; if familiarity withpain enables him so to deal with it, as resolutely to cut off every morbid spiritual growth to which he has been made liable by pain; if, instead of succumbing to unfavourable conditions, he has struggled against dwarfage and distortion, and diligently wrought at the renewal of the inward man, while the outward frame was decaying day by day, he may surmount his humiliations, whatever cause for humility maybe left by so impaired an existence. For him the inuring process will have done its best.

For those who from constitutional irritability cannot become inured, there is, daily opening, and at shorter distance, the grave, where “the weary are at rest.”

For those on whom the inuring process acts amiss,—petrifying instead of vivifying the soul, we may and must hope, on the ground that they are in the hands of one whose ways and thoughts are not ours, nor within our ken. They are a mystery to us, like the cankered buds and blighted blossoms of our gardens. Or it may be, that there is no corruption or decay, but only torpidity, induced by the protraction of their polar night of adversity. It may be, that their life is only hidden away fora season, and that when the breath of the eternal spring shall dissolve their icy bonds, they may start forth as new-born, and their preceding deadness be mercifully counted to them but as a long dream.

There is no danger, no false security to one’s-self, in hoping thus much for them; for one must be as far from reconciling one’s-self to their condition as from preferring dreams to contemplation, or the sleep of the frame to the life of the spirit.

“Turn you to the strong hold, ye prisoners of hope.”Zechariah.

“Wherefore, for virtue’s sakeI can be well contentThe sweetest time in all my lifeTo deem in thinking spent.”Lord Vaux.

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Itis amusing (in a somewhat mournful way, however,) to sick people, to observe how children and other inexperienced persons believe, notwithstanding all explanation and assurance, that it must be a very pleasant thing to be ill—gently ill, so as not to be groaning with pain, or confined to bed. They derive an impression of comfort and luxury from what they see, which it is impossible to weaken by descriptions of suffering which they have never felt, and cannot conceive of. They see the warm room in winter, with its well-cushioned couch, and think how comfortable it must be never to have the toes frozen, or a shower of sleet driven in one’s face. The fire in the chamber all night—the flowers and books that lie strewed about all day—the pictures on the walls—the dainty meals—the punctual and careful attendance—these are things which make illness look extremely pleasant to the healthiest people, who are those that have the keenest relish for pleasure. Few of such are there who have that insight of sympathy which drew from my little friend at my elbow the sighing exclamation—“Ah! but there is the unhealthiness! that spoils everything!”

Even if the ordinary run of inexperienced persons could see the whole of our day, I should not expect them to understand the matter much better. If they saw us turn from the dainty meal, and wear a look of distress and fear, in the midst of everything that to them indicates comfort and security, I imagine that they could only wonder, till they knew for themselves how bodily distress excludes pleasure from outward objects, and how the mental weaknesses which prevail amidst an unnatural and difficult mode of life convert the most innocent and ordinary occurrences into occasions of apprehension, or of self-distrust or self-disgust.

If they must witness the painful and humbling aspect of the mode of life, it is much to be wishedthat they might also see another fact belonging to it—to them, perhaps, no less mysterious than the misery; but not the less salutary for that, as it may teach them that there is much, both of good and evil, in our condition, which it will be wiser in them to observe than to judge of.

The benign mystery which I would have them witness is, the power of ideas over us. A child knows something of this in his own way. In wartime, little boys leave their pet plays to run about and tell everybody the news of a great battle. A child cannot eat the best dinner in the world on the day of first going to the play. The doll is thrown into a corner, when news comes of any acquaintance being burnt out in the middle of the night; or when anecdotes are telling of any old martyr who suffered heroically. In their own way, children are conscious, when reminded, of the power of ideas; but they cannot conceive of our way of experiencing the same force—to us so renovating! If it is at times surprising to the most enlightened and sympathising of our companions, it may well be astonishing to those in the early stages of observation.

They see, with a sort of awe, how pricelessare certain pictures to us, in comparison with all others. They hear us speak of the landscapes, the portraits, the graceful and beautiful images which adorn the walls; but they observe how, when restless and distressed, we steal a glance upwards at one picture, and find something there which seems to set us right—to rally us at once. If such a picture as theChristus Consolatorof Scheffer be within view of the sick-couch—(that talisman, including the consolations of eighteen centuries!—that mysterious assemblage of the redeemed Captives and tranquillised Mourners of a whole Christendom!—that inspired epitome of suffering and solace!)—it may well be a cause of wonder, almost amounting to alarm, to those who, not having needed, have never felt its power. If there were now burnings or drownings for sorcery, that picture, and some who possess it, would soon be in the fire, or at the bottom of a pond. No mute operation of witchcraft, or its dread, could exceed the silent power of that picture over sufferers. Again—if the inexperienced chance to see us in an unfavourable hour, when our self-control cannot rise beyond constraint—when our words are fewest, howevergentle the voice—when our posture is rigid, because we will not be restless, and our faces tell the distress we think we are concealing; if, at such a time, the post comes in, how miraculous must seem the change to one who does not know what we have just read in letters or newspapers—and, perhaps, could not understand its efficacy, if he had seen. He sees us start up on the couch, hears us become voluble, and talk in a free and joyous tone;—beholds us eat and drink, without thinking what is put before us;—perhaps is surprised at a flow of tears, which seems to dissolve the misery, whatever it was; and finds, to his amazement, that all this is caused by something to him so dry as the appointment of a committee in the House—a speech on some hustings—an improved quarter’s revenue;—or, perhaps, something not dry, but merely curious, and to him anything but moving,—a new appearance attending an eclipse—an arrangement for embanking the Nile, or cutting through the Isthmus of Panama, or some vast discovery in science or the arts. He may, again, see the relaxation yet more complete,—may perceive, without a word being spoken, that we are wellfor the hour,—the eye swimming in happiness, the voice full of gentle joy; so that he is convinced that illness does not “spoil everything.” In this case, some comfort has come, too sacred to be told,—at least then; some news or appeal from the primary christians and confessors of our day,—the American abolitionists,—some opening to us for doing some little service,—or, as not seldom happens, some word of true sympathy which rouses our spirit, as the trumpet stirs the war-horse,—some sudden light showing our position on our pilgrim path,—some hint of our high calling,—some apt warning of a pregnant truth, administered by a wise and loving comforter.

If I were asked whether there is any one idea more potential than any other over every sort of suffering, in a mode of life like ours, most hearers of the question would make haste to answer for me that there is such a variety of potential ideas, suited to such wide differences of mood of mind and body, that it must be impossible to measure the strength of any one. Nevertheless, I should reply that there is one, to me more powerful at present than I can now conceive any single idea to have been in any former states of my mind. It is this;that it matters infinitely less what wedothan what weare. I can conceive the amazement of many at this announcement,—of many even who admit its truth, and feelingly admit it, as I myself did when it was first brought home to me from the printed page of one friend by the heart-breathing voice of another. I care not who wonders, and who only half understands, while there are some few to whom this thought may be what it is to me. No one will be so short-sighted as to apply it as an excuse for indolence in the active and healthy,—so clear is it that such cannotbewhat they ought to be, unless theydoall they can. But perhaps it is only the practised in human sorrows who can see far enough into the boundless truth of this thought to appreciate its worth to us. Suffice it here that it has the power I ascribe to it, and that we whom ithasconsoled long to administer it when we see old age restless in its infirmity, activity disappointed of its scope or instruments, or the most useful agents of society, the most indispensable members of families paralysed by disease. We long to whisper it in the dungeons of Spielberg, where it opens a career within the narrowest recess of those thick walls. We longto send a missive to every couch, of the sick, to every arm-chair of the aged and the blind, reminding them that the great work of life is ours still,—through all modes of life but that of the madhouse,—the formation of a heavenly soul within us. If we cannot pursue a trade or a science, or keep house, or help the state, or write books, or earn our own bread or that of others, we can do the work to which all this is only subsidiary,—we can cherish a sweet and holy temper,—we can vindicate the supremacy of mind over body,—we can, in defiance of our liabilities, minister pleasure and hope to the gayest who come prepared to receive pain from the spectacle of our pain; we can, here as well as in heaven’s courts hereafter, reveal the angel growing into its immortal aspect, which is the highest achievement we could propose to ourselves, or that grace from above could propose to us, if we had a free choice of all possible conditions of human life. If any doubt the worth of the thought, from the common habit of overlooking the importance of what isdonein its character of index of what the agentis, let him resort at once to the fountain-head of spiritual exemplification, and saywhether it matters most what Christ was or what he did.

The worth of this particular thought is a separate consideration from that of the worth of any sound abstract idea to sufferers liable to a besetting personal recollection, or doubt, or care. But, before I speak of this, I must allude to a subject which causes inexpressible pain whenever it occurs to us sick prisoners. I have said how unavailing is luxury when the body is distressed and the spirit faint. At such times, and at all times, we cannot but be deeply grieved at the conception of the converse of our own state, at the thought of the multitude of poor suffering under privation, without the support and solace of great ideas. It is sad enough to think of them on a winter’s night, aching with cold in every limb, and sunk as low as we in nerve and spirits, from their want of sufficient food. But this thought is supportable in cases where we may fairly hope that the greatest ideas are cheering them as we are cheered; that there is a mere set-off of their cold and hunger against our disease; and that we are alike inspired by spiritual vigour in the belief that our Father is with us,—that we are onlyencountering the probations of our pilgrimage,—- that we have a divine work given us to carry out, now in pain and now in joy. There is comfort in the midst of the sadness and shame when we are thinking of the poor who can reflect and pray,—of the old woman who was once a punctual and eager attendant at church,—of the wasting child who was formerly a Sunday-scholar,—of the reduced gentleman or destitute student who retain the privilege of their humanity,—of “looking before and after.” But there is no mitigation of the horror when we think of the savage poor, who form so large a proportion of the hungerers,—when we conceive of them suffering the privation of all good things at once,—suffering under the aching cold, the sinking hunger, the shivering nakedness,—without the respite or solace afforded by one inspiring or beguiling idea.

I will not dwell on the reflection. A glimpse into this hell ought to suffice, (though we to whom imagery comes unbidden, and cannot be banished at will, have to bear much more than occasional glimpses;) a glimpse ought to suffice to set all to work to procure for every one of these sufferers, bread and warmth, if possible, and as soon aspossible; but above everything, and without the loss of an hour, an entrance upon their spiritual birthright. Every man, and every woman, however wise and tender appearing and designing to be, who for an hour helps to keep closed the entrance to the region of ideas,—who stands between sufferers and great thoughts, (which are the angels of consolation sent by God to all to whom he has given souls,) are, in so far, ministers of hell,—not themselves inflicting torment, but intercepting the influences which would assuage or overpower it. Let the plea be heard of us sufferers who know well the power of ideas,—our plea for the poor,—that, while we are contriving for all to be fed and cherished by food and fire, we may meanwhile kindle the immortal vitality within them, and give them that ethereal solace and sustenance which was meant to be shared by all, “without money and without price.”

It seems but just (if we may venture so to speak), that there should be the renovating power in ideas that I have described, for our worst sufferings arise from an unmitigated power of ideas in another sort. I am not qualified by experience to speak of severe continued bodily torment,but all testimony seems to concur with all our experience, that there is no such instrument of torture as a besetting thought. The mere description of the suffering, given by those who know it, seems to have wrought upon the general mind, for a kind of shudder goes round when it is mentioned, though it can no more be conceived of by the gay and occupied, than the continual dropping of water on the head can be imagined by him whose transactions with the element consist in a plunge bath every morning. It is known, however, that herculean men have shrunk to shadows under the infliction, that it has reduced heroes to tremble at the whispering wind, or the striking of the clock, that it turns the raven-hair gray, lets down genius into idiocy, and starves the most vigorous life into an atrophy. How then are the sick to meet this woe, which comes upon them with force exactly proportioned to their weakness!

If every sick prisoner in our land were questioned, and could and would answer truly, I believe all would reply (all who have minds) that their worst pangs are in the soul. For the moment,—for the hour,—no agony is, I know, tobe compared with some pains of body; but when the question is of months and years (including the seasons of delicious reaction from bodily pains), I am confident that the peculiar misery of our condition—subjection to a besetting thought—will be owned to absorb all others. Whether the thought relate to any intellectual matter, or whether it be self-abasement and self-weariness at the perpetually-recurring apparition of sins, follies, trifling old misadventures and misbehaviour, or whether some more serious cause of remorse, the tormenting and weakening effects are much alike; the cold horror at waking up to the thought in the middle of the night, knowing that we shall sleep no more; the misery of opening our eyes upon a new day, with the spell of the thought full upon us; the dread of giving ourselves up to thinking, and yet the inability to read, while the enemy is hovering about the page; the faint resolution, broken almost as surely as formed, not to speak of this trouble to our nearest and closest friend, and the ending in speaking of it, in our agony, to many besides. O! there is no aching, no shooting or throbbing pain of fibre or nerve that can (taken with its alternations) compare inmisery with this! Even the anticipation becomes in time the worst, though the bodily pain is known to be real and unavoidable, while the ideal one is clearly seen to be baseless, or enormously exaggerated. The close observer of a sick sufferer may see the drops stand on the forehead, and the quiver pass over the lip, at the bare thought of the certain return of a periodical pain; but worse to endure is the sickening of the soul, at the certainty that at such an hour we shall be under the spiritual dominion of a haunting demon, the foe, as foolish as cruel, whom we defy now with our reason, but shall then succumb to in every faculty. Here is an ordeal for the proud! yet it is not less fearful to the humble; for the humble can no more dispense with self-respect than the proud.

Some may wonder at such a history of an unknown trouble,—some who, when anything harasses them, mount a horse, and gallop over the sea-sands or the race-course, or visit their friends or the theatre, or resort to music, or romp with children. Let them remember that we cannot do these things,—that the very weakness which subjects us to these troubles, forbids our escape fromthem. We know, as well as they, that if once we could feel the open air upon our brows, our feet on the grass, our bodies in exercise and vigour, all would be well with us; but, as we cannot use these remedies, the knowledge is of no immediate avail. If we can get to the window and look abroad, that is well, as far as it goes; but we are most subject to our tyrant in the night, and in midwinter,—at times when we cannot look abroad; and it may even happen, too, that the tyrant dims the sun at noon-day, and blots out the landscape, or renders us blind to it. What then is to be done? We evade the misery, when we can, by stirring books, (the most objective that can be had), or by seeing what we can of the world by the telescope, or by resorting to some sweet familiar spring of poetry; but this last expedient is impaired by the fear of mixing painful associations with pleasures too sacred and dear to be endangered. Or we defy the foe in reckless anguish, or we endure in silent patience.

But there is something far better to be done,—not always; but still, not seldom. We can turn the forces of ideas against themselves—meet them with their own weapons. We can call in thepower of an idea to overcome the tyranny of another idea; and then we come off conquerors, and with a soul-felt joy.

It is a joy to recur, in memory or imagination, to any moral conflict, past or possible, in which all our faculties are needed, and wherein that force is at least conceived to be employed which must otherwise corrode us. But if any such enterprise actually presents itself—confronts us at the moment—how great is the blessing! It may bring toil and difficulty to ourselves, and doubt and blame from others; but if it be clear to ourselves, how keen is the sense of life it gives at some seasons, though it may overpower our weakness at others! It seems hard, when we are feeble and suffering, to have irksome labour to do, to have to oppose the wishes and feelings of some whom we love, and to arouse argument when our longing is for unbroken and lasting rest: but, if our duty be but clear to ourselves, (or for the most part clear, with doubts only in our most sickly hours,) what a new position we find ourselves in, permitted once more to take the offensive side against evil, in alternation with the weary perpetual defensive posture! Happy they, whohave been brought up in allegiance to Duty, more or less strict; and happiest they whose loyalty has been the strictest! In the hour of nature’s feebleness, and apparent decay, they find themselves under the eye and hand of the Physician of souls, who has for them a cordial of heavenly virtue—of heavenly virtue for them, but of no virtue to such as have let their moral nature take its chance, and who, in their hour of extreme need, are no more capable of spiritual enterprise than of a bodily flight beyond the precincts of their pain. They must languish in self-corrosion; while they who happily find how Duty gives “power to the faint,” “mount up with wings as eagles.” With every emergency of singular or unpopular moral action, every occasion for saying with courage a true word, or advocating a neglected cause—with every opportunity, in short, of spiritual enterprise, they soar afresh, and their eyes kindle anew in the light of life.

But this kind of solace could not be,—nor any effectual kind,—but for the power of the master idea of our life. But for Him who “stirreth up the nest,” and whose spirit “taketh and beareth them up” sunwards on her wings, the flights ofthese eagle spirits would utterly fail. But for the ideas inspired by Faith, there could be no enterprise, no true solace, no endurance but of the low, merely submissive kind. Great is the power of all thought, congenial with our nature, over disease of body and morbid tendencies of the mind; but those which connect us with the Maker of our frame and the Ordainer of our lot are absolutely omnipotent. O! let the speculative observer of human nature consider well, and observe that human nature to its extremest limits, before he pronounces that our spirits are not created filial. Let him ponder well the universal aspiration towards a spiritually-discerned parent, before he declares the affection a mere venerable superstition. Let him feel in health and full action,—(or, if he feels it not, let him detect in others,) the pausing horror of a sense of orphanhood, beneath which the moral universe falls in pieces under the hands of its myriad builders. Let him see in the sick-chamber, where the outward and inward world seem alike to the sufferer to be crumbling asunder, how irresistible is the conviction of an upholding power, new-modelling all decaying things, and imbuing themwith immortality. If he himself can but learn what protracted sickness is, let him ponder well whether a superstition, however early and solemnly conveyed and cherished, could stand the stress,—not merely of pain, but of the questionings prompted by pain. Let him say if it can be anything but truth,—absolute congeniality with our souls,—which can give such all-conquering power to the idea of our filial relation to the Ruler of all things.

No one will venture to say how this power is enhanced by the earliest associations. No one will presume to declare precisely how happy above others are they, now sufferers, whose infant speech was practised in prayer at a mother’s knee, and who can now forget the dreariness of the night and the weight of the day in listening for the echoes of old psalmody, and reviving snatches of youthful hymns and religious reverie. No one will dare to say how far the sweet call to “the weary and heavy laden” is endeared by the voice of the Shepherd having gone before us over all the hills and vales of our life. But the true philosopher must, as it seems to me, be assured that the power of these spiritual appeals would oozeaway, in proportion as our faculties are weakened by disease, if they had not in them the divine force of truth to urge them home.

See what this force is, in comparison with others that are tendered for our solace! One and another, and another, of our friends comes to us with an earnest pressing upon us of the “hope of relief,”—that talisman which looks so well till its virtues are tried! They tell us of renewed health and activity,—of what it will be to enjoy ease again,—to be useful again,—to shake off our troubles and be as we once were. We sigh, and say it may be so; but they see that we are neither roused nor soothed by it.

Then one speaks differently,—tells us we shall never be better,—that we shall continue for long years as we are, or shall sink into deeper disease and death; adding, that pain and disturbance and death are indissolubly linked with the indestructible life of the soul, and supposing that we are willing to be conducted on in this eternal course by Him whose thoughts and ways are not as ours,—but whose tenderness.... Then how we burst in, and take up the word! What have we not to say, from the abundance of our hearts, of that benignity,—that transcendant wisdom,—our willingness,—our eagerness,—our sweet security,—till we are silenced by our unutterable joy!

Whence this imbecility of the “hope of relief?”

Whence this power of the idea of God our Father?

Do we know of anything stronger and higher than ideas? In the strongest and highest,—(even an omnipotent and infinite) idea,—if we have not Truth, whatisTruth?

“But few that court retirement are awareOf half the toils they must encounter there.”Cowper.

“We are not to repine, but we may lawfully struggle.”Johnson.

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Idesireto notice, very briefly, some perils and pains of our condition,—briefly premising that, as only the initiated can fully sympathise, it will be sufficient, and therefore best, to indicate rather than expatiate.

We are in ever-growing danger of becoming too abstract,—of losing our sympathy with passing emotions,—and particularly with those shared by numbers. There was a time when we went to public worship with others,—to the theatre,—to public meetings; when we were present at picnic parties and other festivals, and heard general conversation every day of our lives. Now, we are too apt to forget those times. The danger is, lest we should get to despise them, and to fancy ourselves superior to our former selves, because now we feel no social transports.

A lesser danger is that of fearing to experience emotions. If a barrel-organ makes itself heard from the street,—or a salute, on anniversaries, from the castle,—or a crowd gathers on the ridge to enjoy a regatta,—what a strange thrill comes over us! What a shrinking from being moved! How we wonder when we recal some discourse, whereby the voice of the preacher roused the souls of a multitude at once,—or when we awake within us the echoes of some Easter anthem, or of the Hallelujah Chorus in Westminster Abbey,—or when we image to ourselves a crowded theatre, when one tragic fear or horror bound together all the spirits that came for pleasure! When we try to imagine a flow of talk in which minds uttered themselves without thought of individuals;—when we revive these scenes of our former lives, we gasp for breath,—we wonder what we could have been made of to endure the excitement;—we are certain that we should die on the spot if we encountered it now. It might be so: but we must remember that our present condition is the morbid one, and not the former. We must keep up our sympathies, as far as we may, by cherishing such festal feelings as may survive; and everremembering that our grave, and solid, and abstract life is adapted to only a portion of our nature, and that our exclusion from spontaneous emotions,—from all experience of sympathetic transport,—is a heavy misfortune, under which it behoves us to humble ourselves.

Those of us are well off who have, like myself, the advantage of some outward symbol which serves as communication between them and the world. Flags are my resource of this kind. Little do those who hoist them imagine how a hidden invalid appropriates their signals! The Union Jack on the flag-staff, in the castle-yard, marks Sunday to me in a way I would not miss. When I look abroad on Sabbath mornings, it tells of rest and church-going; and it is a matter of serious business with me to see it brought down at sunset,—a mute token in which there is more pathos than I could tell. And then the flags on the churches of the opposite shore on festal days tell me of a stirring holiday world,—make me hear again the Park and Tower guns,—show me fireworks and illuminations, and arouse something of the hum and buzz of a gay and moving crowd. Once more, the foreign flags hoisted by ships coming intoport,—mere signals for pilots in intention,—speak, unknown to any one, a world of things to me. I learned them long ago, by heart, and with my heart. When I see a foreign vessel come bounding towards the harbour, and perceive, the moment she hoists her flag, whether she has cut across from a Norway fiord, or has contested her way from the Levant, or found a path from the far Indies, or brings greetings from some familiar American port,—what a boon is that flag to me! Sometimes I point my telescope, to see the sailors’ lips move in the utterance of a foreign tongue: at all events, I see in a moment the peaks of Sulitelma or of the Andes, or the summits of the Ghauts, or tropical sands, or chilly pine forests spread before me, or palmy West Indian groves. It is morally good, and unspeakably refreshing, to have some such instrumentality of signals with the world without, as these flags are to me.

There is a corresponding danger, though a less serious one, in such sympathy as we have making us repine. Though we may go on from month to month without one momentary wish that things were otherwise with us than as they are, yet, on occasion—once, perhaps, in a year—some incidentwakens a thrill of longing to be as we once were. Some notice of a concert, or a picture, brings up the associations of a London spring, with all its intellectual and social pleasures:—or the mere mention of a lane or hedge, at the moment the March sun is shining in, recals the first hunting for violets in our days of long walks:—or a foreign post-mark in autumn transports us to Alpine passes or the shores of Italian lakes; and a sickly longing for scenes we shall see no more comes over us. But the reaction is so rapid and sure, that there is little moral peril in this—only the evanescent pain, which gives place to that act of acquiescence which has in it more joy than can be gathered from all the lanes, mountains, and shores of the globe.

The occasional sense of our being too weak for the ordinary incidents of life, is strangely distressing. The cry of an infant makes us wretched for hours after, in spite of every effort of reason. I saw, through my telescope, two big boys worrying a little one, and I could not look to see the end of it. They were so far off that there was nothing to be done. The distress to me was such—the picture of the lives of the three boys wasso vivid—that I felt as if I had no reason nor courage left. The same sort of distress recurred, but in a more moderate degree, when I saw a gentleman do a thing which I wish could dwell on his mind as it does upon mine. I saw, through the same telescope, a gentleman pick up from the grass, where children had been playing the moment before, under the walls of the fort, a gay harlequin—one of those toy-figures whose limbs jerk with a string. He carried it to his party, a lady and another gentleman, sitting on a bench at the top of the rocks, whose base the sea was washing. When he had shown off the jerkings of the toy sufficiently, he began to take aim with it, as if to see how far he could throw. “He never will,” thought I, “throw that toy into the sea, while there are stones lying all about within reach!” He did it! Away whirled harlequin through the air far into the sea below: and there was no appearance of any remonstrance on the part of his companions! I could not look again towards the grass, to see the misery of the little owner of the toy on finding it gone. There was no comfort in the air of genteel complacency with which the three gentry walked down from therocks, after this magnanimous deed. How glad should I be if this page should ever meet the eye of any one of them, and strike a late remorse into them! To me the incident brought back the passions of my childhood—the shock I have never got over to this hour—on reading that too torturing story of Miss Edgeworth’s, about the footman, who “broke off all the bobbins, and put them in his pocket, rolled the weaving-pillow down the dirty lane, jumped up behind his lady’s carriage, and was out of sight in an instant.” I think these must be the words, for they burnt themselves in upon my childish brain, and have stirred me with passion many a time since; as this harlequin adventure will ever do.

Many will wonder at all this—will despise such sensitiveness to trifles, considering what deeds are done every day in the world. They do not know the pains and penalties of sickness—that is all: and it may do them no harm to learn what they are, while my fellow-sufferers may find some comfort in an honest recognition of them.

This sensitiveness takes worse directions, however, and inflicts more misery still. It subjects some of us to a scrupulosity, particularly abouttruth, which brings endless troubles. Every mistake of fact that we happen to know of afflicts us as if we were responsible for it,—and more than it ought if we were so responsible. We tend to an absurd restlessness to set everything right; and of course, above all, what concerns ourselves. If any kind friend pities us too much, and praises us for our patience under sufferings which he supposes to be greater than we are actually enduring, we remonstrate, and explain, as if his sympathy were not good for him and us, at any rate; and as if, having told only truth ourselves, it could matter much how our troubles are rated—whether over or under. We call up images of all who suffer far more than ourselves, and implore him to go and pity them—to honour them and not us. If he smiles and answers, well, he will go and pity and honour them—but he must be sorry for us, too—we smile, also, at our own scrupulosity, though we see in it only a new symptom of disease.

There is yet a worse direction taken by this sensitiveness—both morally and in experience worse. Though our observation of life encourages hope, on the whole, to a boundless extent, both asto affairs and to human character, it teaches some truths about individual characters which are almost too much for our weakened condition. It may be absurd—it may be wrong—to be more afflicted about the faults and failings of the best and most beloved people, than about the vices and gross follies of a lower order of men; but such affliction is, to us, quite inevitable. It is not wholly irrational; for it is a melancholy sight to witness the encroachment of any bad habit of mind in those who should be outgrowing such bad habits, instead of being mastered by them. But we know it to be the common order of things that every man, even the best, carries about with him through life some fault or failing (the shadowy side of his brightest quality, if nothing worse), and that it is the rarest thing in the world to see any strong tendency overcome after the age of resolution, the youthful season of moral heroism, is past: yet, knowing this, it is not the less painful to witness it, with the clearness and strength with which the spectacle offers itself to us, on our post of observation. While working in the world, side by side with those whose doings we now contemplate, we were willing to be deceived in each particular instance;willing to expect that the judgment and action of those we loved and clung to would, in each case, be accordant with their best gifts and graces; and, however often disappointed, we made allowance for the known frailty, and inconsistently hoped it would be better next time. We now see too clearly to be deceived. With the discernment of love, and the power of leisure, we can accurately calculate the allowance to be made—we can precisely measure the obliquity beforehand—and save ourselves at least from disappointment. But there is no solace in this. There is more pain in the proof of the permanent character of faults (permanence including inevitable growth), than in perpetual new evidence of their existence; more sorrow in our prophetic power now than in our credulous weakness of old. The accurate readers of human character may be admired and envied for their infallible knowledge of how men will think and act; but, if they have a true heart-love for those whom they watch, they cannot much enjoy their power. If they have not love, neither can they be happy; so that it requires a penetrative knowledge indeed, into the ways of God as well as man, for such skill to be reconcileable withpeace and with our human affections. It is a burdensome knowledge for us to wield, in our weakened condition, and one which it requires an ever-strengthening faith to convert into a nourisher of love.

The faults I have alluded to are such only as are compatible with general sincerity—such as have a character of frailty. Those which include tendencies essentially low—untruth, double-dealing, and selfish policy—assume so disgusting an aspect, when tested by the trying light and amidst the solemn leisure of the sick-room, that it cannot be wrong to follow willingly the irresistible leadings of nature—to dismiss them with loathing, and invite to our arms the simple and heroic sincerity, and the cheerful devotedness to the honour of God and the interests of man, which here assume much of the radiance in which they come back in vision from beyond the grave. If it be true that our moral taste becomes more sensitive in our seclusion, I trust that such sensitiveness has not necessarily any fastidiousness in it, but that its relish of good grows in full proportion to its discipline. I trust that if its disgust deepens as the low and cowardly order of faults are strippedto nakedness, so does its appreciation become more expanded and generous in regard to qualities which befit our heroic and aspiring nature and destination.

As for our best resource under the liabilities I have alluded to, a mere reference will suffice. “Whatsoever things are honest, pure, holy, lovely—to think on these things;” to fill our souls with conceptions of the god-like, so that our sensitiveness may turn in time to a keen apprehension of all that is in affinity with these; this is what we have to do—partly for present solace, and much more for the chance of converting our weakness into power—our mortal discipline into a heavenly habitude.

As for the ordinary and familiar sufferings and dangers of our state, the weariness of life which every one but the physician wonders at, often as it is witnessed; the longing for non-existence, which some pious people, who admit no bodily origin of any mental affection, are very much shocked at; the despair during protracted violent pain, which, however, being dumb, is seldom known at the moment—these cannot be illustrated, nor remedied, by anything that can be said onpaper. One can only suggest to the sufferer, and to wise nurses, that in the power of ideas we are furnished with an implement of natural magic which may possibly operate at the most hopeless times. It was in a sort of despair that the father of the lame child, inconsiderately led out too far, gave the boy his stick to ride home on; whereupon the aching foot actually traversed the needful mile without being felt to ache. So the wise nurse may possibly find that a nobler idea than any hope of rest or relief may reanimate a spirit under a far severer pain. And assuredly there are some who could tell how, in the midst of anguish, the briefest suggestion of endurance, the slightest spiritual touch upon deep filial affections, has made a miraculous truce for them with torment and despair.

Observers of the sick think very seriously of their liability to become wedded to their own ways, and engrossed by their own occupations. The fact is as they see it; but it would be happy for us if we had no worse mistakes to apprehend. Those of the sequestered who may re-enter the world will be pretty sure to fall in love with new ways and employments, and to feel a quite sufficient disgust with their own. And if they are never to re-enter life, is it not well for them that they can spend some energies, which would otherwise be corrosive, upon outward things? If their souls are too narrow and purblind to live beyond the bounds of their abode, the best thing for them is to get through the rest of their time as easily as they can, in the way that suits them best. If they are of a higher order, their observers may be assured of two things—that their investment of energy on the ways and occupations of their singular and trying life, is no more than a needful absorption of a power which would otherwise destroy them; and also, that there is no fear of these things becoming indispensable to them or sufficient for them. There are hours, witnessed by no observers, when they find it wise to desist from their most esteemed employments, in condescension to their own weakness, and recognise in this discipline the lesson of the day. There are hours, witnessed by no observers, when the insufficiency of such objects is felt as keenly and pressingly as by the Missionary on his way to the heathen, or the Prime Minister with the interests of nations in the balance before his eyes—or bythe drowning man before whose soul life lies pictured in the instant of time which remains to him. This liability, though real, is insignificant and transient, compared with many others.

There is a safeguard against it, too, in our own weakness. There is even, for some, a danger of growing absolutely idle, from a sense of the littleness of what they can do. Formerly they acted on the rule—“not a day without a line,” and now, thrown out of their habit by the absolute incapacity of some days, and disheartened by the small show made by their utmost rational diligence, they give up, and do nothing,—or nothing with regularity. This is a fearful danger. Nowhere are habits of regular employment more necessary than in such a life as ours; and, if we cannot preserve the absolute erectness of rationality,—if we must lean to the error of particularity or of indifference—I have no doubt of the former being the safer of the two;—the least injurious, and the most curable under a change of influences.

One of our most humbling and trying liabilities I do not remember to have seen mentioned anywhere, though it is so common and so deeply felt, that I have no doubt of a response from everysick prisoner (of a considerate mind), whose eye will fall upon this page, I mean our unfitness for doubtful moral enterprise. Fordoubtfulmoral enterprise, let it be observed. Where the case is clear, where the right appears to our own eyes to be all on one side, whatever may be on the other, moral enterprise becomes our best medicine; it becomes health and new life to us, as I have elsewhere said, be the responsibility and the immediate consequences to ourselves what they may. But when the case is not so clear, when we are pressed (as all conscientious people, sick or well, strong or feeble, are at times) by antagonist considerations of duty, we cannot, as in our vigorous days, take a part in some clear hour, and strengthen ourselves to bear recurring doubts, and to take cheerfully even conviction of mistake, if experience should prove our conscientious decision to have been unsound. We are not in a condition to bear recurring doubts, or to take cheerfully a conviction of moral mistake. Our duty, in our depressed circumstances, is to avoid such moral disturbance as we have not force to quell. We must, in submission and compassion to our own weakness, evade a decision if we honestly can; and if wecannot, we must accept of help—human help—and proceed upon the opinion of the soundest and most enlightened mind we can appeal to.

If there are any who lift the eyebrows, and shrug the shoulders at the supposition of this case, and declare that there is infallible direction to be found, in all particular cases, in the principles of religion, in answer to prayer, in the guidance of clergy, or the general opinion of mankind, I warn such that they will discover, sooner or later, that there is yet something for them to learn of morals, of the human mind, and of God’s discipline of humanity.

There is no point of which I am more sure than that it is unwise in sick people to keep a diary. Some suppose this task to be one of the duties of the sick-room; whereas I am confident that it is one of the most dangerous of snares. The traveller, moving from scene to scene in high health and spirits, keeps a diary; he looks at it a few years after, and can scarcely believe his own eyes when he sees how many entries there are of his hunger, thirst, and sleepiness. He searches anxiously for a record of some fact, important to the determination of a truth in science—some factof which he has a vague impression; he cannot find it, but finds in its stead that he was chilly on that morning, or went to bed hungry that night. If it be so in his case, how should the journal of a sick-room avoid becoming a register of the changes of a morbid state? Not only this; but it can scarcely contain anything better. The experiencing and recording instruments themselves, the mind and body, are in a morbid condition, and cannot be trusted to perceive and record faithfully. Moreover, our tendency is, at the best, to an intense and growing self-consciousness, and our efforts should, therefore, be directed to having our minds called out of themselves—to causing our days to pass away as little marked as possible. A diary of public events, a register of books read, or of the opinions of those whose opinions are valuable on the great questions of the time, may be more or less amusing and profitable to keep; but then the rule should be absolute to exclude all mention of ourselves: and my own belief is, that it is wisest to avoid the temptation altogether—to keep clear of all bondage to ourselves and to habit that can be declined.

I was unutterably moved, lately, by the reading of a diary, preserved in MS., of one of the most innocent, holy, and devoted of God’s human children; a creature who entered upon life endowed with good gifts, spiritual, intellectual, and external, and who wasted away in body, dwindled away in mind, and sank early to the grave, clearly through the force given by superstition to a corroding self-consciousness, to which she was by constitution liable. Her diary yields clear lessons which might profitably be made known, but that they are not apparently recognised by those who had the charge of herself in life, and hold her papers now. Among these lessons, one is to our present purpose. Her diary became more and more a register of frames and feelings, each mood of which was fearfully important to herself as a token of God’s dispositions towards her. To an eye which now reads the whole at once, side by side with the dates and incidents of her life, nothing can be clearer than that the risings and fallings of her spiritual state exactly corresponded with the condition of her health. In one portion, the record becomes almost too painful to be borne. While her days were passed in heavenly deeds, and hersolitude in prayer, she sinks daily lower and lower in hope and cheer: and at last, after a record of most mournful humiliation, we find a notice which explains all—of the breaking of a blood-vessel. To us it is nothing strange to experience fluctuations of more than spirits—of heart and soul, and to ascertain, after a time, that they were owing to physical causes. We even anticipate these changes, and know that when we awake in the morning, we shall be harassed by such and such a thought; that at such an hour of the day we shall suffer under remorse for such and such an old act and word, or under fear of the consequences of conduct which, at other seasons, we know to be right. We have that to tell of ourselves, which seems as a key to the mournful diary I have mentioned. This experience, and such warnings as that which has so deeply moved me, should teach us the wisdom and duty of not cherishing—by recording—our personal cares, but rather of “casting them upon Him who careth for us.” The most fitting sick-room aspiration is to attain to a trusting carelessness as to what becomes of our poor dear selves, while we become more and more engrossed bythe vast interests which our Father is conducting within our view, from the birdie which builds under our eaves, to the gradual gathering of the nations towards the fold of Christ, on the everlasting hills.

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