be families gathering
daily around one altar, praying not for themselves merely, but for each
other.

The conclusion of the whole matter is this: Set apart some provision to
make merry with _at home_, and guard that reserve as religiously as the
priests guarded the shew-bread in the temple. However great you are,
however good, however wide the general interests that you may control,
you gain nothing by neglecting home-duties. You must leave enough of
yourself to be able to bear and forbear, give and forgive, and be a
source of life and cheerfulness around the hearthstone. The great sign
given by the Prophets of the coming of the Millennium is,--what do you
suppose?--"He shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and
the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the
earth with a curse."

Thus much on avoiding unhealthy, irritable states.

But it still remains that a large number of people will be subject to
them unavoidably for these reasons.

_First._ The use of tobacco, alcohol, and other kindred stimulants, for
so many generations, has vitiated the brain and nervous system, so that
it is not what it was in former times. Michelet treats of this subject
quite at large in some of his late works; and we have to face the fact
of a generation born with an impaired nervous organization, who will
need constant care and wisdom to avoid unhealthy, morbid irritation.

There is a temperament called the HYPOCHONDRIAC, to which many persons,
some of them the brightest, the most interesting, the most gifted, are
born heirs,--a want of balance of the nervous powers, which tends
constantly to periods of high excitement and of consequent
depression,--an unfortunate inheritance for the possessor, though
accompanied often with the greatest talents. Sometimes, too, it is the
unfortunate lot of those who have not talents, who bear its burdens and
its anguish without its rewards.

People of this temperament are subject to fits of gloom and despondency,
of nervous irritability and suffering, which darken the aspect of the
whole world to them, which present lying reports of their friends, of
themselves, of the circumstances of their life, and of all with which
they have to do.

Now the highest philosophy for persons thus afflicted is to understand
themselves and their tendencies, to know that these fits of gloom and
depression are just as much a form of disease as a fever or a toothache,
to know that it