LETTER XLVI.
Dear Charles,—It may be that some true Christians,
in fits of insanity, have died by their own act. We know
that often devout and excellent persons have departed this
life with melancholy and yet unfounded forebodings of evil
to come; but I am altogether sure that so far from religion
causing melancholy, it is the best, and with some men, the
only cure of melancholy.
There is a melancholy mainly owing to physical causes,
and which may be removed by removing its natural cause,
by medicine or regimen. This species of melancholy,
whether regarded as the primary or secondary disease, inclines,
nay, indeed, forces us to look at religion, as at all
other things, through colored and distorted mediums. Hence
many will perversely extract fresh misery from what, if
rightly understood, would even for disordered nerves become
the greatest alleviation, if not entire cure.
Unlike the bee, which extracts honey from deadly plants,
physical melancholy draws poison and bitterness from health-giving
sweetness.
But, Charles, there is a melancholy arising from moral
causes. That melancholy in some cases cannot be healed
or eradicated except by moral means,—except the mind
can be satisfied that it has a peace and quietude based upon
a rock.
This kind of melancholy tends, indeed, to produce physical
disorder, and that disorder will induce physical melancholy.
The evil is continually aggravated, unless the originating
cause be removed. It is wholly in vain often to use
medicines, or take journeys, or seek pleasant company, or to
try any modified dissipation, or frequent scenes of mere
amusement; by these very medicines and alleviations, moral
melancholy will be rapidly increased, and become at length
so insupportable as to end in madness or suicide, or more
frequently in drunkenness. All such cures are a mockery.
The sick and wounded soul, stretched night and day on a
rack of indescribable torture, is relieved by such matters, as
a poor victim would be amused and soothed by witnessing
a game of jack-straws, as he writhed upon a cross!
My own deep and abiding conviction is, that the moral
melancholy—if so we may distinguish it from melancholy
arising solely from mere physical causes—the moral melancholy,
in all its many degrees of intensity, is one of the ordinary
means which the Divine Spirit employs to convert our
souls from earth to heaven. It ought, therefore, ever to be
regarded as a visitation of great mercy. So it would prove,
if men would go whither that melancholy is sent to drive
them—to the religion of Jesus Christ.
That, Charles, is the rock, and the only rock, in this wide
universe, on which the agitated and gloomy sould can securely
stand—there and there only can the melancholy rest.
And if the melancholy man once gets there, he will assuredly
find “a peace” the world cannot give, and which it cannot—
no, most truly and emphatically—cannot take away! Standing
there, cloud after cloud will disperse and pass away;
and the very world, which before seemed so unspeakably
frightful, will become invested with strange beauty and glory.
And now with his selfishness removed, and with a new
motive and desire implanted, the renovated man will cheerfully
descend to his worldly duties; not for the purpose of
enjoying pleasure, or indulging ambition, or getting wealth
and power;—not to make himself the centre and to aggregate
all of possible earthly good around his person and seat,
and to become a god to himself and to fit up the earth as a
heaven;—but simply and mainly to please a Heavenly
Father, as a loving and revereful son to do a father's will!
This miraculously renovated man will exemplify in the best
and highest possible sense, the change beautifully figured in
the tablet of Cebes; and he will have a most wonderful and
joyous perception of that promise, even fulfilled to the very
letter, when we believe it and obediently act according to it,
“Seek first the kingdom of heaven, and all these things shall
be added unto you!” Yes, yes, the man feels that he now
has the world—and riches, and fathers, and mothers, and
brothers, and sisters, a thousand-fold! By throwing away
the world he has found it—by resolutely turning heavenward,
he has got heaven, and with it the universe!
Nor shall the moral melancholy return, except so far as
the man approximates again his former thoughts and ways,
and forgets God. This man shall be every day and every hour
more and more satisfied that it is not religion, but the want
of religion, which makes men wretched and melancholy.
The gay world—it is, alas! too true—will make light of all
this; the worldly wise will smile with contemptuous pity;
the infidel will hug himself into self-complacent and falsely
philosophic thought of exemption from cynical priestcraft
and puritanism and superstitions; the epicurean will flourish
his glass and cry, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow
we die:”—but, oh! ye dear brothers! whose souls are
dark and joyless, and who choose strangling and death rather
than life, let one who has been far down into the abyss of the
dark waters; who has struggled in the deep pit and its miry
clay; who cared not to live, and yet feared to die; oh!
brothers, let that one, with the arms of a true pity around
your neck, and with a soul of profoundest sympathy clinging
to yours, let him, with streaming eyes and voice of tenderest
love, exhort you to try
this remedy for the “wounded
spirit!”
Brothers!—brothers!—for your sakes, and for Christ's
sake, let me be called a fool and a fanatic—but I do know
there “is balm in Gilead,” to heal and soothe, and “a
peace” the Son of God can give, and does give; and that
the change in the inmost spirit is as the change from the
woes of damnation to the joys of paradise! And all these
are “words of truth and soberness;” and with the gushings
of a full and honest soul the redeemed one would thus win
you from melancholy to joy!
But know, brothers, that this special mercy of God in
moving upon the dark and troubled waters, by sending this
moral melancholy into our bosoms, is very near to a special
and remediless danger! I shudder—but it is the last appeal!
To those that hear, it is the voice of thunder! To those
that see, it is the flash of keenest lightning! As came a
voice to the Apostle Paul, unheard by the attendants, who
were struck down by that terrifying brightness above the
light of the sun, so is the voice of the Lord God Almighty
loud, clear, articulate, awful in our melancholy souls, saying,
not in wrath, but in infinite tenderness and love, “Son, give
me thine heart!”
Beware!—oh! by all that is measureless in the weal or
woe of eternity!—by that agony and bloody sweat of the
Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world!—by that
wrath of the Holy One that when kindled burneth to the
lowest hell!—Beware! If we heed not this last invitation
and rebuke!—if we deliberately refuse Him so speaking to
us from heaven!—if in the midst of a joyless, rayless, hopeless
melancholy, we yet despise His blood-bought hope
and joy and peace!—
that, oh! brothers, is akin to a wilful
and deliberate rejection of mercy!—a trampling that blood!
* * * * * * * And is it wonderful if
then we
should be rejected?—or given over to believe a lie?—or
abandoned to Satan?—or left to drunkenness?—or to die by
our own act?
Melancholy ones!—you shall never!—no! never! find
peace again but with the Son of God! The crisis of your
changeless destiny is come—heaven or hell!
In this way, dear Charles, would I exhort and weep over
Selden and all others in his alarming state. Read him my
letters, and read with tears in your eyes.
