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Updated: June 3, 2025
The illusion is one that besets us all. We are all tempted to make a defence of the things that we can see and handle. Is it not strange, and is it not sad, that most of us just turn the truth round about and suppose that the real defence is the imaginary, and that the imaginary one is the real?
Often we allow gloom to overcome us and so hinder the bright rays in their passage; but would we do it so often if we thought that perhaps a sadness which besets us, we do not know why, was caused by some one drawing nigh to us for comfort, whom our lethargy might make feel still more his helplessnes, while our courage, our faith might cause "our light to shine in some other heart which as yet has no light of its own"?
It is difficult to describe fully the extraordinary sense of freedom that came from this change. For anxiety the great modern emotion is something that besets a life on all sides so silently and so continuously that it escapes direct detection. But it is there, tightening the muscles, crinkling the skin, quickening the heart and shortening the breath.
The cares and the wealth and the pleasures are three classes of one thing. Perhaps the first chiefly besets struggling people; the second mainly threatens well-to-do people; the third, perhaps, is most formidable to leisurely and idle people.
When friends seem careless of you, when poverty encroaches, when suffering ensues from wrongs others have done, when sickness or any kind of calamity besets you, and when you are hunted to the verge of gloom, cling to the ropes which hope suspends about you, and they will surely pull you back from the abyss. These trials all have their uses. And, pray, be mindful of the way you look at things.
For when worry besets you, is harassing you on every hand, how can you possibly devote your wisdom, your highest intelligence to safeguarding the welfare of the one you love. Never was a slave in the South, though in the hands of a Legree, more to be pitied than the slave of worry. He dogs every footstep, is vigilant every moment.
"I struggle against the lassitude which besets me, and strive in vain to be either sensible or jocose. I had better say farewell." On Christmas day, 1854, he writes in rather flagging spirits, induced by ill health: "I have owed you a letter for these many months, my good friend.
"You SAID Bogy lived in the cellar," said Amabel. Nurse was in a dilemma which deservedly besets people who tell untruths. She had to invent a second one to help out her first. "That's at night," said she: "he lives in the wood in the daytime." "Then I can go into the cellar in the day, and the wood at night," retorted Amabel; but in her heart she knew the latter was impossible.
And now we come to the most important section of our appeal. What can be done? We are a kindly people and we are a just people, but we are also a very conservative people. The fate of all pioneers besets those who attempt to move in this matter. They are jeered at, or, what is worse, neglected.
With the older boys, from the years of sixteen or eighteen upward, organization for literary development and debating should be tried. A good deal in a cultural way is necessary to offset the danger which now besets the successful farmer of becoming a slave to money-making, after the fashion of the great magnates whom he condemns but with rather less of their general perspective of life.
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