Many imagine, unless they are at all times in a glow of fervour--an ecstatic frame of feeling--all must be wrong with them.[14] Now, there is nothing more dangerous or deceptive than a life of mere feeling; and its _most_ dangerous phase is a life of religious emotional excitement. It is in the last degree erroneous to consider all this glowing ecstasy of frame a necessary condition of healthy spiritual life. Artificial excitement, in any shape, is perilous. Apart altogether from the moral and religious aspect of the question, the tendency of the ball-room and theatre, and a preference in reading for works of fiction, is to make a man nauseate the plain, commonplace work, the occurrences and themes of this every-day world. Feed him on dainties and forced meats, and he despises husks and plain fare. Equally true is this with regard to the life of the soul. It is not fed on luscious stimulants and ecstatic experiences. When it is so, the result is every now and then a collapse; like a child building his mimic castle too high, the perpendicular and equilibrium are lost. It totters and falls, and he has just to begin again. The dew distils, and hangs its spangled jewels on blade and flower, gently and in silence. The rain comes down in tiny particles and soft showers, not in drenching water-floods. So the healthy Christian holds on the even tenor of his way, unaffected by the barometer of feeling. He knows this is apt to be elevated and depressed by a thousand accidents over which he has no control. His life is fed, not from the fitful and uncertain streams issuing from the low ground of his own experience, but from the snow-clad summits--the Alps of God. Were he thus suffering himself to depend on the rills of his own feelings, his brook would often be dry in summer--the season when he most needed it; whereas the supply from the glacier-beds on which the sun shines, is fullest in these very times of drought. [14] "You will not be asked in the last Great Day whether you had great enjoyment and much enlargement of soul here. Speak to that vast multitude, which no man can number, now around the throne. Ask them whether they came through much _consolation_ and joy in the Lord. No! through much _tribulation_. Ask them whether they were saved by their warmth of love to their Saviour. No! but they had washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb."--_Miss Plumptre's Letters._