"It is worth," said Dr. Johnson, "a thousand pounds a year to have the habit of looking on the bright side of things." It is worth more than all money to have the capacity, the power, the will to see the bright side of things, to possess the assurance that there is a veritable and persisting bright side of things, when the mind is gloomed by physical weakness and the heart is conscious only of languor and distress. At such a dull time even a long-established habit may desert us; with our faculties clouded and obscured we are tempted to doubt the entire philosophy of our former life; we sink down into the sheets of discomfort, and roll our heads restlessly on the pillow of discontent; we almost extract a morbid satisfaction from the fuliginous surrenderings of pessimism. Mrs. Gummidge at our bedside might be as unwelcome as Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, or Zophar the Naamathite; but there is a Widow in the soul of all men as mournful and lugubrious as the tearful sister of Mr. Peggotty, and in our weakness it is often this dismal self-comforter we are disposed to summon to our aid. "My soul is weary of my life," cried Job; "I will leave my complaint upon myself; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul." Now, there is not a wise doctor in the world, nor any man who truly knows himself, but will acknowledge and confess the enormous importance to physical recovery of mental well-being. The thing has become platitudinous, but remains as difficult as ever. If Christian Science on its physiological side had been an easy matter it would long ago have converted the world. The trouble is that obvious things are not always easy. It is obvious to the victim of alcoholic or nicotine poisoning that he would be infinitely better in health could he abjure alcohol or tobacco; he does not need to be philosophised or theologised into this conviction; he knows it better than his teachers. His necessity is a superadded force to the will within his soul which has lost the power of action. And so with the will of the sick person, who knows very well that if he could rid himself of dejection and heaviness his health would come back to him on swallows' wings. Obvious, palpable, more certain than to-morrow's sun; but how difficult, how hard, nay, sometimes how impossible! An honest man like Father Tyrrell confesses that in certain bouts with the flesh faith may desert us, even the religious faith of a life-time may fall in ruins round our naked soul.