Men make the mistake of working according to their opportunities, and not according to their capacity of endurance.  “Can I run this train from Springfield to Boston at the rate of fifty miles an hour?” says an engineer.  Yes.  “Then I will run it reckless of consequences.”  Can I be a merchant, and the president of a bank, and a director in a life insurance company, and a school commissioner, and help edit a paper, and supervise the politics of our ward, and run for Congress?  “I can!” the man says to himself.  The store drives him; the school drives him; politics drive him.  He takes all the scoldings and frets and exasperations of each position.  Some day at the height of the business season he does not come to the store; from the most important meetings of the bank directors he is absent.  In the excitements of the political canvass he fails to be at the place appointed.  What is the matter?  His health has broken down.  The train halts long before it gets to the station.  A hot axle!

Literary men have great opportunities opening in this day.  If they take all that open, they are dead men, or worse, living men who ought to be dead.  The pen runs so easy when you have good ink, and smooth paper, and an easy desk to write on, and the consciousness of an audience of one, two or three hundred thousand readers.  There are the religious newspapers through which you preach, and the musical journals through which you may sing, and the agricultural periodicals through which you can plough, and family newspapers in which you may romp with the whole household around the evening stand.  There are critiques to be written, and reviews to be indulged in, and poems to be chimed, and novels to be constructed.  When out of a man’s pen he can shake recreation, and friendship, and usefulness, and bread, he is apt to keep it shaking.  So great are the invitations to literary work that the professional men of the day are overcome.  They sit faint and fagged out on the verge of newspapers and books.  Each one does the work of three, and these men sit up late nights, and choke down chunks of meat without mastication, and scold their wives through irritability, and maul innocent authors, and run the physical machinery with a liver miserably given out.  The driving shaft has gone fifty times a second.  They stop at no station.  The steam-chest is hot and swollen.  The brain and the digestion begin to smoke.  Stop, ye flying quills!  “Down brakes!” A hot axle!

Some of the worst tempered people of the day are religious people, from the fact that they have no rest.  Added to the necessary work of the world, they superintend two Sunday-schools, listen to two sermons, and every night have meetings of charitable and Christian institutions.  They look after the beggars, hold conventions, speak at meetings, wait on ministers, serve as committeemen, take all the hypercriticisms that inevitably come to earnest workers, rush up and down the world and develop their hearts at the expense of all the other functions.  They are the best men on earth, and Satan knows it, and is trying to kill them as fast as possible.  They know not that it is as much a duty to take care of their health as to go to the sacrament.  It is as much a sin to commit suicide with the sword of truth as with a pistol.