ss is found in nervous excesses and overwork.
Men drain away their vitality. Ambitions unduly stimulate the brain.
Many break the laws of sleep and the laws of digestion and the laws of
nerve sobriety. They spend their brain capital. Then they grow
hopeless toward home and business. Ill-health spreads a gloom over all
life. Every judgment is pessimistic; it could not be otherwise. The
jaundiced eye yellows the landscape. The sweetest music rasps like a
file upon the nervous ear. Thomas Carlyle's pessimism was largely
physical. He overworked upon his life of Oliver Cromwell. Maurice
once said: "Carlyle believed in God down to the time of Oliver
Cromwell." Once, in a moment of depression, Lyman Beecher prayed:
"Lord, keep us from despising our rulers, and help them to stop acting
so we cannot help despising them." Poor, nerve-racked Pascal, grew
fearful lest his affection for his sister, who had nursed him through a
long illness, was sinful. One day he wrote in his journal: "Lord,
forgive me for loving my dear sister so much!" Afterward he drew his
pen through the word "dear." Hope and trust toward God go with health.
Sickliness is not saintliness. God cannot save by hope what man
destroys by ill-health.

Dean Stanley used hopefulness as a test of all systems of truth.
Rightly so. God is the God of hope, and his truth, like himself,
carries the atmosphere of good cheer. The falsity of medievalism
appears in this--it robbed men of joy and gladness. God was the center
of darkness. His throne was iron. His heart was marble. His laws
were huge implements of destruction. His penalties were red-hot cannon
balls crashing along the sinner's pathway. Repentance toward God was
moving toward the arctics and away from the tropics. Christianity was
anything but "peace on earth, good will to men."

Philosophers destroyed God's winsomeness. The reformers came in to
lead men away from medievalism back to God himself. Men found hope
again in redemptive love. They saw that any conception of God that
dispirited and depressed men was perverted and false. No man hath done
more to establish this fact than him who long ago said: "Any
presentation of the gospel of Jesus Christ that does not come to the
world as the balmy days of May comes to the unlocked northern zones;
any way of preaching the love of God in Christ which is not as full of
sweetness as the voice of the angels when they sang at the advent; any
way o