cannot learn more common sense! I suppose that all people of
anxious minds tend to find the waking hour a trying one. The mind,
refreshed by sleep, turns sorrowfully to the task of surveying the
difficulties which lie before it. And yet a hundred times have I
discovered that life, which seemed at dawn nothing but a tangle of
intolerable problems, has become at noon a very bearable and even
interesting affair; and one should thus learn to appreciate the
tonic value of occupation, and set oneself to discern some pursuit,
if we have no compulsory duties, which may set the holy mill
revolving, as Dante says; for it is the homely grumble of the gear
which distracts us from the other sort of grumbling, the self-
pitying frame of mind, which is the most fertile seed-plot of fear.

"How happy I was long ago; how little I guessed my happiness; how
little I knew all that lay before me; how sadly and strangely
afflicted I am!" These are the whispers of the evil demon of
fearfulness; and they can only be checked by the murmur of
wholesome and homely voices.

The old motto says, "Orare est laborare," "prayer is work"--and it
is no less true that "laborare est orare," "work is prayer." The
truth is that we cannot do without both; and when we have prayed
for courage, and tried to rejoice in our beds, as the saints who
are joyful in glory do, we had better spend no time in begging that
money may be sent us to meet our particular need, or that health
may return to us, or that this and that person may behave more
kindly and considerately, but go our way to some perfectly
commonplace bit of work, do it as thoroughly as we can, and simply
turn our back upon the hobgoblin whose grimaces fill us with such
uneasiness. He melts away in the blessed daylight over the volume