Receive such intervals of excitement as heaven-sent aids, to help you more easily over, it may be, a wearying and dreary path.  They are most probably sent in answer to prayer—­in answer to the prayers of your own heart, or to those of some pious friend.

Our Father in heaven works constantly by earthly means, and moulds the weakest, the often apparently useless instrument to the furtherance of his purposes of mercy, one of which you know is your own sanctification.  It is not his holy word only that gives you appointed messages and helps exactly suited to your need.  The flower growing by the way-side, the picture or the poem, the works of God’s own hand, or the works of the genius which he has breathed into his creature Man, may all alike bear you messages of love, of warning, of assistance.

Listen attentively, and you will hear—­clearer still and clearer—­every day and hour.  It is not by chance you take up that book, or gaze upon that picture; you have found, because you are on the watch for it, in the first, a suggestion that exactly suits your present need, in the latter an excitement and an inspiration which makes some difficult action you may be immediately called on to perform comparatively easy and comparatively welcome.

There is a deep and universal meaning in the vulgar[63] proverb, “Strike while the iron is hot.”  If it be left to cool without your purpose being effected, the iron becomes harder than ever, the chains of nature and of habit are more firmly riveted.

There are some other features of self-control to which I wish, though more cursorily, to direct your attention.  They have all some remote bearing on your moral nature, and may exercise much influence over your prospects in life.

Like many other persons of a refined and sensitive organization, you suffer from the very uncommon disease of shyness.  At the very time, perhaps, when you desire most to please, to interest, to amuse, your over-anxiety defeats its own object.  The self-possession of the indifferent generally carries off the palm from the earnest and the anxious.  This is ridiculous; this is degrading.  What you wish to do you ought to be able to do, and you will be able, if you habitually exercise control over the physical feelings of your nature.

I am quite of the opinion of those who hold that shyness is a bodily as well as a mental disease, much influenced by our state of health, as well as by the constitutional state of the circulation; but I only put forward this opinion respecting its origin as additional evidence that it too may be brought under the authority of self-control.  If the grace of God, giving efficacy and help to our own exertions, can enable us to resist the influence of indigestion and other kinds of ill-health upon the temper and the spirits, will not the same means be found effectual to subdue a shyness which almost sinks us to the level of the brute creation by depriving us of the advantages of a rational will?  Even this latter distinguishing feature of humanity is prostrated before the mysterious power of shyness.