Page:The Clergyman's Wife.djvu/327
Sometimes this morbid tendency of the mind to "take trouble on interest," to multiply its actual amount, and conjure up its vanished ghosts, is inherent and hereditary. Then it gives birth to a demon, difficult, indeed, to exorcise, for his feet are planted among the deepest fibres of the heart, and his murky form rises in giant strength, and possesses the soul as a lawful home. Religion, Reason and Philosophy must unite in a powerful triad, and wage fierce war against the fiend before he can be cast out, and life's sunny side can be revealed to the spirit he has enslaved.
Sometimes this despondency of character is the offspring of sheer ingratitude, and a disregard of, or disbelief in, the perpetual guidance of an overruling Providence. Then is the daily punishment it entails no heavier than its sin, and the sunny side shall never be disclosed to these unthankful hearts until they are cleansed and illumined.
Sometimes this mental gloom springs from purely physical causes. D'Israeli takes a very prosaic, but common sense and useful view of the subject, when he says, "Our domestic happiness often depends upon the state of our biliary or digestive organs, and the little disturbances of conjugal life may be more efficaciously cured by the physician than the moralist." Happily the bilious mists that veil the sunshine from the eyes of this dismal class of beings may be dispelled by a few strokes of the cabalistic pen, and the sufferer find an open sesame