room, each of you would probably involuntarily rearrange
himself, and make his attitude more "free and easy." But proprieties
and their inhibitions snap like cobwebs if any great emotional
excitement supervenes. I have seen a dandy appear in the street with
his face covered with shaving-lather because a house across the way was
on fire; and a woman will run among strangers in her nightgown if it be
a question of saving her baby's life or her own. Take a self-indulgent
woman's life in general. She will yield to every inhibition set by her
disagreeable sensations, lie late in bed, live upon tea or bromides,
keep indoors from the cold. Every difficulty finds her obedient to its
"no." But make a mother of her, and what have you? Possessed by
maternal excitement, she now confronts wakefulness, weariness, and toil
without an instant of hesitation or a word of complaint. The inhibitive
power of pain over her is extinguished wherever the baby's interests
are at stake. The inconveniences which this creature occasions have
become, as James Hinton says, the glowing heart of a great joy, and
indeed are now the very conditions whereby the joy becomes most deep.

This is an example of what you have already heard of as the "expulsive
power of a higher affection." But be the affection high or low, it
makes no difference, so long as the excitement it brings be strong
enough. In one of Henry Drummond's discourses he tells of an
inundation in India where an eminence with a bungalow upon it remained
unsubmerged, and became the refuge of a number of wild animals and
reptiles in addition to the human beings who were there. At a certain
moment a royal Bengal tiger appeared swimming towards it, reached it,
and lay panting like a dog upon the ground in the midst of the people,
still possessed by such an agony of terror that one of the Englishmen
could calmly step up with a rifle and blow out its brains. The tiger's
habitual ferocity was temporarily quelled by the emotion of fear, which
became sovereign, and formed a new centre for his character.

Sometimes no emotional state is sovereign, but many contrary ones are
mixed together. In that case one hears both "yeses" and "noes," and
the "will" is called on then to solve the conflict. Take a soldier,
for example, with his dread of cowardice impelling him to advance, his
fears impelling him to run, and his propensities to imitation pushing
him towards various courses if his comrades