Despair may be serviceable when it arises from a temporary
prostration of spirits: during which the mind is insensibly
healing, and her scattered power silently returning. This is better
than to be the sport of a teasing hope without reason. But to
indulge in despair as a habit is slothful, cowardly, short-sighted;
and manifestly tends against Nature. Despair is then the paralysis
of the soul.

These are the principal causes of despair--remorse, the sorrows of
the affections, worldly trouble, morbid views of religion, native
melancholy.


REMORSE.

Remorse does but add to the evil which bred it, when it promotes,
not penitence, but despair. To have erred in one branch of our
duties does not unfit us for the performance of all the rest, unless
we suffer the dark spot to spread over our whole nature, which may
happen almost unobserved in the torpor of despair. This kind of
despair is chiefly grounded on a foolish belief that individual
words or actions constitute the whole life of man: whereas they are
often not fair representatives of portions even of that life. The
fragments of rock in a mountain stream may tell much of its history,
are in fact results of its doings, but they are not the stream.
They were brought down when it was turbid; it may now be clear:
they are as much the result of other circumstances as of the action
of the stream; their history is fitful: they give us no sure
intelligence of the future course of the stream, or of the nature of