him for directions, and in this way gradually took upon himself
not only all the general superintendence that belonged to his office, but
stole away so many of the special duties which might fairly have belonged
to his assistant, that, before she knew it, she was looking better and
feeling more cheerful than for many and many a month before.

When the nervous energy is depressed by any bodily cause, or exhausted by
overworking, there follow effects which have often been misinterpreted by
moralists, and especially by theologians. The conscience itself becomes
neuralgic, sometimes actually inflamed, so that the least touch is agony.
Of all liars and false accusers, a sick conscience is the most inventive
and indefatigable. The devoted daughter, wife, mother, whose life has
been given to unselfish labors, who has filled a place which it seems to
others only an angel would make good, reproaches herself with
incompetence and neglect of duty. The humble Christian, who has been a
model to others, calls himself a worm of the dust on one page of his
diary, and arraigns himself on the next for coming short of the
perfection of an archangel.

Conscience itself requires a conscience, or nothing can be more
unscrupulous. It told Saul that he did well in persecuting the
Christians. It has goaded countless multitudes of various creeds to
endless forms of self-torture. The cities of India are full of cripples
it has made. The hill-sides of Syria are riddled with holes, where
miserable hermits, whose lives it had palsied, lived and died like the
vermin they harbored. Our libraries are crammed with books written by
spiritual hypochondriacs, who inspected all their moral secretions a
dozen times a day. They are full of interest, but they should be
transferred from the shelf of the theologian to that of the medical man
who makes a study of insanity.

This was the state into which too much work and too much responsibility
were bringing Helen Darley, when the new master came and lifted so much
of the burden that was crushing her as must be removed before she could
have a chance to recover her natural elasticity and buoyancy. Many of
the noblest women, suffering like her, but less fortunate in being
relieved at the right moment, die worried out of life by the perpetual
teasing of this inflamed, neuralgic conscience. So subtile is the line
which separates the true and almost angelic sensibility of a healthy, but
exalted nature, f