night have
meetings of charitable and Christian institutions. They look after the
beggars, hold conventions, speak at meetings, wait on ministers, serve as
committeemen, take all the hypercriticisms that inevitably come to earnest
workers, rush up and down the world and develop their hearts at the expense
of all the other functions. They are the best men on earth, and Satan knows
it, and is trying to kill them as fast as possible. They know not that it
is as much a duty to take care of their health as to go to the sacrament.
It is as much a sin to commit suicide with the sword of truth as with a
pistol.

Our earthly life is a treasure to be guarded, it is an outrageous thing to
die when we ought to live. There is no use in firing up a Cunarder to such
a speed that the boiler bursts mid-Atlantic, when at a more moderate rate
it might have reached the docks at Liverpool. It is a sin to try to do the
work of thirty years in five years.

A Rocky Mountain locomotive engineer told us that at certain places they
change locomotives and let the machine rest, as a locomotive always kept in
full heat soon got out of order. Our advice to all overworked good people
is, "Slow up!" Slacken your speed as you come to the crossings. All your
faculties for work at this rate will be consumed. You are on fire now--see
the premonitory smoke. A hot axle!

Some of our young people have read till they are crazed of learned
blacksmiths who at the forge conquered thirty languages, and of shoemakers
who, pounding sole-leather, got to be philosophers, and of milliners who,
while their customers were at the glass trying on their spring hats, wrote
a volume of first-rate poems. The fact is no blacksmith ought to be
troubled with more than five languages; and instead of shoemakers becoming
philosophers, we would like to turn our surplus of philosophers into
shoemakers; and the supply of poetry is so much greater than the demand
that we wish milliners would stick to their business. Extraordinary
examples of work and endurance may do as much harm as good. Because
Napoleon slept only three hours a night, hundreds of students have tried
the experiment; but instead of Austerlitz and Saragossa, there came of it
only a sick headache and a botch of a recitation. We are told of how many
books a man can read in the five spare minutes before breakfast, and the
ten minutes at noon, but I wish some one could tell us how much rest a man
can get in fifteen minutes