But there is a territory always
liable to be differed about between them. There are patients who
never tell their physician the grief which lies at the bottom of their
ailments. He goes through his accustomed routine with them, and thinks
he has all the elements needed for his diagnosis. But he has seen no
deeper into the breast than the tongue, and got no nearer the heart than
the wrist. A wise and experienced clergyman, coming to the patient's
bedside,--not with the professional look on his face which suggests
the undertaker and the sexton, but with a serene countenance and a
sympathetic voice, with tact, with patience, waiting for the right
moment,--will surprise the shy spirit into a confession of the doubt,
the sorrow, the shame, the remorse, the terror which underlies all the
bodily symptoms, and the unburdening of which into a loving and pitying
soul is a more potent anodyne than all the drowsy sirups of the world.
And, on the other hand, there are many nervous and over-sensitive
natures which have been wrought up by self-torturing spiritual exercises
until their best confessor would be a sagacious and wholesome-minded
physician.

Suppose a person to have become so excited by religious stimulants
that he is subject to what are known to the records of insanity as
hallucinations: that he hears voices whispering blasphemy in his ears,
and sees devils coming to meet him, and thinks he is going to be torn
in pieces, or trodden into the mire. Suppose that his mental conflicts,
after plunging him into the depths of despondency, at last reduce him to
a state of despair, so that he now contemplates taking his own life, and
debates with himself whether it shall be by knife, halter, or poison,
and after much questioning is apparently making up his mind to commit
suicide. Is not this a manifest case of insanity, in the form known as
melancholia? Would not any prudent physician keep such a person under
the eye of constant watchers, as in a dangerous state of, at least,
partial mental alienation? Yet this is an exact transcript of the mental
condition of Christian in "Pilgrim's Progress," and its counterpart
has been found in thousands of wretched lives terminated by the act of
self-destruction, which came so near taking place in the hero of the
allegory. Now the wonderful book from which this example is taken is,
next to the Bible and the Treatise of "De Imitatione Christi,"
the best-known religious work of Christendom. If B