"_Cheerfulness as a Medicine._--Perhaps nothing has a greater tendency to
cast gloom over the spirit than _disease_. The mind sympathizes with the
body as much as the body with the mind. Their union is so intimate, so
delicate, so sensitive, that what affects the one necessarily affects the
other. Each to a certain degree determines the other's condition. If the
mind is joyful, its emotion is betrayed by the expression of the body. 'A
merry heart maketh a cheerful countenance.' But if the body is injured, or
the physical system deranged, the mind at once suffers, and forthwith
droops into sadness. It becomes, therefore, your Christian duty, if you
have health, to study the laws of your physical being; to compel yourself
both to labor and to rest; to avoid unnecessary risks or exposure; to
abstain from injurious indulgences; to be prudent, temperate, chaste, and,
by every proper means, to try to preserve what is so essential to your
spiritual comfort. If you have lost this boon, strive to regain it. Think
not, speak not, all the while about your malady. Suppress moans and
complaints. They are always disagreeable to others; they can never be
beneficial to you. Count your mercies, and not your miseries. Try upon
your body the stimulus of a cheerful spirit. It may not insure your
recovery, but it will certainly produce a pleasant alleviation. 'A merry
heart doeth good like a medicine; but a broken spirit dryeth the bones.'
"_Borrowing Trouble._--Forebodings of evil rob the mind of cheerfulness.
'Ills that never happened have mostly made men wretched,' says Tupper.
Casting our glance ahead, we see 'lions' in the way; difficulties which we
are sure we can never overcome; griefs under whose heavy weight we shall
be utterly crushed. Not satisfied with our present troubles, we borrow
misery from the future. The Holy Scripture instructs us to do otherwise.
'Thou knowest not what a day may bring forth.'--Prov. xxvii. 1. 'Take
therefore no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for
the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.'--Matt.
vi. 34. And then it gives us a golden promise, 'As thy days, so shall thy
strength be.'
"The life of many Christians is a life of constant sadness and gloom. They
seem to be entire strangers to all the happiness of earth and all the
hopes of heaven. Their faces commonly appear as sombre as the stones which
mark the dwelling-places of the dead. Their feelings are better expressed
in sighs than in songs. Unhappy themselves, they make others unhappy. They
come and go like clouds, shutting out the sunshine from cheerful hearts,
and for a while casting upon them shadows cold and dark.
"Arise, O, desponding one! Quit your tearful abode in the valley of gloom,
and come and make your dwelling on the bright hill-top of cheerfulness.
Look up! look up! and behold the sun shining through the clouds, and the
stars through the darkness."