but a good Christian ought not to become a
confirmed dyspeptic. Reasonable self-control, abstaining from all
unseasonable indulgence, may prevent or put an end to dyspepsia, and
many suffer and make their friends suffer only because they will persist
in eating what they know is hurtful to them.

But it is not merely in worldly business, or fashionable amusements, or
the gratification of appetite, that people are tempted to overdraw and
use up in advance their life-force. It is done in ways more insidious,
because connected with our moral and religious faculties. There are
religious exaltations beyond the regular pulse and beatings of ordinary
nature, that quite as surely gravitate downward into the mire of
irritability. The ascent to the third heaven lets even the Apostle down
to a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet him.

It is the temptation of natures in which the moral faculties predominate
to overdo in the outward expression and activities of religion till they
are used up and irritable, and have no strength left to set a good
example in domestic life.

The Reverend Mr. X. in the pulpit to-day appears with the face of an
angel; he soars away into those regions of exalted devotion where his
people can but faintly gaze after him; he tells them of the victory that
overcometh the world, of an unmoved faith that fears no evil, of a
serenity of love that no outward event can ruffle; and all look after
him and wonder, and wish they could so soar.

Alas! the exaltation which inspires these sublime conceptions, these
celestial ecstasies, is a double and treble draft on Nature,--and poor
Mrs. X. knows, when she hears him preaching, that days of miserable
reaction are before her. He has been a fortnight driving before a gale
of strong excitement, doing all the time twice or thrice as much as in
his ordinary state he could, and sustaining himself by the stimulus of
strong coffee. He has preached or exhorted every night, and conversed
with religious inquirers every day, seeming to himself to become
stronger and stronger, because every day more and more excitable and
excited. To his hearers, with his flushed sunken cheek and his
glittering eye, he looks like some spiritual being just trembling on his
flight for upper worlds; but to poor Mrs. X., whose husband he is,
things wear a very different aspect. Her woman and mother instincts tell
her that he is drawing on his life-capital with both hands, and that th