Of the spiritual deaths, as of the physical, more than half take place in the period of teething.  The more one thinks of the parallelism, the closer it looks, until the likeness seems as droll as dismal.  Oh, the sweet, unquestioning infancy which takes its food from the nearest breast; which knows but three things,—­hunger and food and sleep!  There is only a little space for this delight.  In our seventh month we begin to be wretched.  We drink our milk, but we are aware of a constant desire to bite; doubts which we do not know by name, needs for which there is no ready supply, make us restless.  Now comes the old-school doctor, and thrusts in his lancet too soon.  We suffer, we bleed; we are supposed to be relieved.  The tooth is said to be “through.”

Through!  Oh, yes; through before its time.  Through to no purpose.  In a week, or a year, the wounded flesh, or soul, has reasserted its right, shut down on the tooth, making a harder surface than ever, a cicatrized crust, out of which it will take double time and double strength for the tooth to break.

The gentle doctor gives us a rubber ring, it has a bad taste; or an ivory one, it is too hard and hurts us.  But we gnaw and gnaw, and fancy the new pain a little easier to bear than the old.  Probably it is; probably the tooth gets through a little quicker for the days and nights of gnawing.  But what a picture of patient misery is a baby with its rubber ring!  Really one sees sometimes in the little puckered, twisting face such grotesque prophecy of future conflicts, such likeness to the soul’s processes of grappling with problems, that it is uncanny.

When we come to the analysis of the diseases incident to the teething period, and the treatment of them, the similitude is as close.

We have sharp, sudden inflammations; we have subtle and more deadly things, which men do not detect till it is, in nine cases out of ten, too late to cure them,—­like water on the brain; and we have slow wastings away; atrophies, which are worse than death, leaving life enough to prolong death indefinitely, being as it were living deaths.

Who does not know poor souls in all stages of all these,—­outbreaks of rebellion against all forms, all creeds, all proprieties; secret adoptions of perilous delusions, fatal errors; and slow settling down into indifferentism or narrow dogmatism, the two worst living deaths?

These are they who live.  Shall we say any thing of those of us who die between our seventh and eighteenth spiritual month?  They never put on babies’ tombstones “Died of teething.”  There is always a special name for the special symptom or set of symptoms which characterized the last days.  But the mother believes and the doctor knows that, if it had not been for the teeth that were coming just at that time, the fever or the croup would not have killed the child.