Our Nervous Friends — Illustrating the Mastery of NervousnessCarroll, Robert S. (Robert Sproul)
Science
Our Nervous Friends — Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness
Carroll, Robert S. (Robert Sproul)
Nervous system -- Hygiene
One morning Mrs. Yarnell called a neighboring doctor. She couldn't
waken Irene. It was found that her sleep had become so poor that she
had bought some powders from the druggist. Never having taken
medicine, she was easily influenced, and the ordinary dose left her
confused for twenty-four hours. Two weeks' rest at home, if one could
rest in Mrs. Yarnell's company, found the girl no stronger. The banker
and the doctor had a conference. She must be gotten away from home.
The banker had a doctor-friend, a man whose means made it unnecessary
for him to give his years of strength to the unceasing demands of a
general practice. He had long been keenly interested in the
complicated and growing problem of nervousness. He owned a beautiful
place down the Ohio River where, for years, he had been taking into
his home a few deserving, nervous invalids. He had learned to enter
into their lives with a specialist's skill-with a father's
understanding. Thus he gave largely--to some it would seem, of his
substance, but the true giving was his discerning, constructive
comprehension of human problems. Into this atmosphere, God and the
banker sent Irene.
For nearly twenty years this oversensitive girl had known few hours of
understanding and sympathy. For a week or two she merely rested; then
one evening, it seemed precipitate, but some way it was as easy as
anything she had ever done, she told the story we have heard. There,
revealed, was the defect of a life, a problem to be worked out by the
analytic student of mankind. Was it to introduce a little saving
recklessness, the redeeming truth of honesty and justice to self, or
the neutralizing of self-negation by the acceptance of merited worth!
Even through our weaknesses are we sometimes healed. If any reason
existed which could merit one self-accusing thought, the doctor found
it when he uncovered the resentment which had never healed toward the
usurping stepmother--"a woman who had proved her limitations and
should be mercifully judged thereby," he told Irene.
"Yes," the doctor said, "you have missed the 'second blessing'; you
have missed a thousand blessings because the generosity of your years
of fine doing were lacking in the gentleness of feeling which Aunt
Effie taught you, and which made your mother so beloved. Lacking this,
even in the fulness of your much giving, you have failed. You have
been seeking the true religion. Your mother had it-the kind that
lightens the dead heaviness and puts heaven's color into the dull,
dark hours at home. Herein, only, have you fallen short."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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