It is not so; he feels and believes
it all at the time. But he is taking a one-sided view of things; he is
undergoing the misery of it acutely for the time, but by-and-by he will
see things from quite a different point. A very eminent man (there can
be no harm in referring to a case which he himself made so public)
wrote and published something about his _miserable home_. He was quite
sincere, I do not doubt. He thought so at the time. He _was_ miserable
just then; and so, looking back on past years, he could see nothing but
misery. But the case was not really so, one could feel sure. There
had been a vast deal of enjoyment about his home and his lot; it was
forgotten then. A man in very low spirits, reading over his diary,
somehow lights upon and dwells upon all the sad and wounding things; he
involuntarily skips the rest, or reads them with but faint perception
of their meaning. In reading the very Bible, he does the like thing.
He chances upon that which is in unison with his present mood. I think
there is no respect in which this great law of the association of ideas
holds more strictly true than in the power of a present state of mind,
or a present state of outward circumstances, to bring up vividly before
us all such states in our past history.
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