stead
of the day. Be careful and not write many letters while you are in that
irritated mood. You will pen some things that you will be sorry for
afterward.

Let us remember that these spiked nettles of life are part of our
discipline. Life would get nauseating if it were all honey. That table
would be poorly set that had on it nothing but treacle. We need a little
vinegar, mustard, pepper and horse-radish that brings the tears even when
we do not feel pathetic. If this world were all smoothness, we would never
be ready for emigration to a higher and better. Blustering March and
weeping April prepare us for shining May. This world is a poor hitching
post. Instead of tying fast on the cold mountains, we had better whip up
and hasten on toward the warm inn where our good friends are looking out of
the window, watching to see us come up.

Interrupting the governor at this point, we asked him if he did not think
that rowing, ball playing and other athletic exercises might be made an
antidote to the morbid religion that is sometimes manifest. The governor
replied:

No doubt much of the Christian character of the day lacks in swarthiness
and power. It is gentle enough, and active enough, and well meaning enough,
but is wanting in moral muscle. It can sweetly sing at a prayer meeting,
and smile graciously when it is the right time to smile, and makes an
excellent nurse to pour out with steady hand a few drops of peppermint for
a child that feels disturbances under the waistband, but has no
qualification for the robust Christian work that is demanded.

One reason for this is the ineffable softness of much of what is called
Christian literature. The attempt is to bring us up on tracts made up of
thin exhortations and goodish maxims. A nerveless treatise on commerce or
science in that style would be crumpled up by the first merchant and thrown
into his waste-basket. Religious twaddle is of no more use than worldly
twaddle. If a man has nothing to say, he had better keep his pen wiped and
his tongue still. There needs an infusion of strong Anglo-Saxon into
religious literature, and a brawnier manliness and more impatience with
insipidity, though it be prayerful and sanctimonious. He who stands with
irksome repetitions asking people to "Come to Jesus," while he gives no
strong common-sense reason why they should come, drives back the souls of
men. If, with all the thrilling realities of eternity at hand, a man has
nothing to wr