One may pray as whole-heartedly as one will against the tendency to fear; but it is a great help to realise that the very experiences which seem now so overwhelming had little or no effect upon one in youthful and high-hearted days.  It is not really that the quality of events alter; it is merely that one is losing vitality, and parting with the irresponsible hopefulness that did not allow one to brood, simply because there were so many other interesting and delightful things going on.

One must attack the disease, for it is a disease, at the root; and it is of little use to shrink timidly from the particular evil, because when it is gone, another will take its place.  We may pray for courage, but we must practise it; and the best way of meeting particular fears is to cultivate interests, distractions, amusements, which may serve to dispel them.  We cannot begin to do that while we are under the dominion of a particular fear, for the strength of fear lies in its dominating and nauseating quality, so that it gives us a dreary disrelish for life; but if we really wish to combat it, we must beware of inactivity; it may be comfortable, as life goes on, to cultivate a habit of mild contemplation, but it is this very habit of mind which predisposes us to anxiety when anxiety comes.  Dr. Johnson pointed out how comparatively rare it was for people who had manual labour to perform, and whose work lay in the open air, to suffer from hypochondriacal terrors.  The truth is that we are made for labour, and we have by no means got rid of the necessity for it.  We have to pay a price for the comforts of civilisation, and above all for the pleasures of inactivity.  It is astonishing how quickly a definite task which one has to perform, whether one likes it or not, draws off a cloud of anxiety from one’s spirit.  I am myself liable to attacks of depression, not causeless depression, but a despondent exaggeration of small troubles.  Yet in times of full work, when meetings have to be attended, papers tackled, engagements kept, I seldom find myself suffering from vague anxieties.  It is simply astonishing that one cannot learn more common sense!  I suppose that all people of anxious minds tend to find the waking hour a trying one.  The mind, refreshed by sleep, turns sorrowfully to the task of surveying the difficulties which lie before it.  And yet a hundred times have I discovered that life, which seemed at dawn nothing but a tangle of intolerable problems, has become at noon a very bearable and even interesting affair; and one should thus learn to appreciate the tonic value of occupation, and set oneself to discern some pursuit, if we have no compulsory duties, which may set the holy mill revolving, as Dante says; for it is the homely grumble of the gear which distracts us from the other sort of grumbling, the self-pitying frame of mind, which is the most fertile seed-plot of fear.

“How happy I was long ago; how little I guessed my happiness; how little I knew all that lay before me; how sadly and strangely afflicted I am!” These are the whispers of the evil demon of fearfulness; and they can only be checked by the murmur of wholesome and homely voices.