Neurasthenia, or nerve-weakness, "the vapours" of the old novelists and dramatists, is a very common malady, and it gives the clergyman trouble by the turmoil it causes in families, religious communities, in themselves, and elsewhere. Whether the condition is a distinct disease or not, and that question has been voluminously discussed, is not altogether an important matter, but that there is such a group of symptoms is unfortunately a weighty fact. It takes so many forms that it is bewildering, and therefore not readily reduced to unity. The cerebral form often exists independently. There is such a thing as "brain fag," although many complainants may have very little material for the fag to work on. Often such a patient is robust, even an athlete, and his assertions meet with ridicule or abuse instead of treatment. If the patient is a woman she is not seldom called "hysterical." She is not hysterical. Hysteria, by the way, is as distinct a trouble as a broken leg, and far more serious, and not a synonym for perverseness, as the term is popularly used. In the cerebral form, business, reading, study "go into one ear and out the other." The patient's memory fails him temporarily just when he may need it most, say, in a speech or sermon; a fly buzzing on a pane is a calamity and a source of profanity; a flat note in the choir-singing is ample reason for doubting the divine origin of the church, and every petty trouble that whisks its harmless tail across his floor makes him seek the table-top. I have known a whole convent of nuns, who were closely shut in, with bad ventilation and a worse cook, until all were more or less neurasthenic, almost {231} disintegrated by the presence of a lamb sent in as a pet; not because of the bleating or any ordinary reason, but solely because of the hideous incongruity and indecency in the fact that the lamb was a male. The cerebral neurasthenic makes rash, impetuous changes in his mode of life. He leaves a religious order because the coffee is weak, he resigns an important post in a bank because the president uses snuff, he abandons medicine for trade because the curate meddled in the treatment of two of his patients. He takes on anxiety, locks up the house six times over the same night; meals are eaten in awed silence by his trembling children; altogether he is an unmitigated nuisance. He may get religious scruples. If he is a priest he takes an hour to an hour and a half to say a low mass, and most of that time is spent in searching the corporal for imaginary particles or in drying the dry chalice. He rereads his breviary until he is exhausted. Because moral theologians say that certain scruples are from the devil, he is convinced that the devil takes a particular interest in his case. The devil did probably take a special interest in his father's or grandfather's lack of scrupulosity, for his condition is commonly a result of alcoholism in an ancestor.