I am going now to write on another cause of family unhappiness, more
subtile than either of those before enumerated.
In the General Confession of the Church, we poor mortals all unite in
saying two things: "We have left undone those things which we ought to
have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have
done." These two heads exhaust the subject of human frailty.
It is the things left undone which we ought to have done, the things
left unsaid which we ought to have said, that constitute the subject I
am now to treat of.
I remember my school-day speculations over an old "Chemistry" I used to
study as a text-book, which informed me that a substance called Caloric
exists in all bodies. In some it exists in a latent state: it is there,
but it affects neither the senses nor the thermometer. Certain causes
develop it, when it raises the mercury and warms the hands. I remember
the awe and wonder with which, even then, I reflected on the vast amount
of blind, deaf, and dumb comforts which Nature had thus stowed away. How
mysterious it seemed to me that poor families every winter should be
shivering, freezing, and catching cold, when Nature had all this latent
caloric locked up in her store-closet,--when it was all around them, in
everything they touched and handled!
In the spiritual world there is an exact analogy to this. There is a
great life-giving, warming power called Love, which exists in human
hearts dumb and unseen, but which has no real life, no warming power,
till set free by expression.
Did you ever, in a raw, chilly day, just before a snow-storm, sit at
work in a room that was judiciously warmed by an exact thermometer? You
do not freeze, but you shiver; your fingers do not become numb with
cold, but you have all the while an uneasy craving for more positive
warmth. You look at the empty grate, walk mechanically towards it, and,
suddenly awaking, shiver to see that there is nothing there. You long
for a shawl or cloak; you draw yourself within yourself; you consult the
thermometer, and are vexed to find that there is nothing there to be
complained of,--it is standing most provokingly at the exact temperature
that all the good books and good doctors pronounce to be the proper
thing,--the golden mean of health; and yet perversely you shiver, and
feel as if the face of an open fire would be to you as the smile of an
angel.
Such a lifelong chill, such an habitual shiver, is the lot of many
natures, which are not warm, when all ordinary rules tell them they
ought to be warm,--whose life is cold and barren and meagre,--which
never see the blaze of an open fire.