1844-54. SYMPATHY WITH INVALIDS. 395 



reluctance with which you must have left Cambridge just when 

 a new term was beginning. When one is exceedingly ill, one 

 is engrossed with the calamity which compels everything to 

 yield to it : and when well, how much there is to do -! But to 

 be neither very ill nor very well ; to have a certain fitness for 

 work, and conviction of its importance, and yet no sustaining 

 relish or enduring capacity for it, this is a sore trial of faith and 

 patience, as months of its endurance have again taught me. 



" Yet I am sure such seasons will often, with God's blessing, 

 teach us what exulting health and terrible agony cannot, and 

 are as needful to ripen many of us for another world, as a cup 

 running over with mercies, or sharp strokes of affliction. Great 

 torture is not only maddening, but enslaving; it makes the 

 mind reel, and fills the heart with terror. Full health is self- 

 reliant, God -forgetting, and unheeding. A dreary season, such 

 as you see before you, often permits a more profitable study of 

 God, and carries us farther forward in the Divine life, than the 

 extremes of ill-health or its opposite will do. 



" I do not overlook, in saying this, that the moral regimen 

 suitable for one mind will not serve another, and that what 

 profited me may not benefit you. I have nothing but my own 

 experience to speak certainly from ; but, after all, we are of like 

 passions and infirmities, and will be more or less affected in the 

 same way by the same causes. 



" Neither do I forget that a mind unstrung for secular study, 

 is enfeebled for religious work also. How often have I this 

 summer felt a mean childish gladness, that the chapter to be 

 read was a short one ; and been as apathetic as if there were 

 neither God nor devil in the universe. 



" Nevertheless, we have a promise of the Holy Spirit's help in 

 our religious work, which, as it is supernatural in nature and 

 source, is not at the mercy of sickness. It does not, in reference 

 to this, at all matter what theological theory we hold as to 

 inspiration. We both believe that one of the good gifts which 

 Christ's death procured for us, is the sanctifying presence of the 

 Holy Ghost in our hearts. We cannot distinguish His workings 

 from those of our own spirits, yet we can believe that where 

 it may please God to cut us off from relish and capacity for 



