To go back now to our general maxims, I may at last, as a fifth and final practical maxim about habits, offer something like this:  Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so that, when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.  Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods.  The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return.  But, if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin.  So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things.  He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.

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I have been accused, when talking of the subject of habit, of making old habits appear so strong that the acquiring of new ones, and particularly anything like a sudden reform or conversion, would be made impossible by my doctrine.  Of course, this would suffice to condemn the latter; for sudden conversions, however infrequent they may be, unquestionably do occur.  But there is no incompatibility between the general laws I have laid down and the most startling sudden alterations in the way of character.  New habits can be launched, I have expressly said, on condition of there being new stimuli and new excitements.  Now life abounds in these, and sometimes they are such critical and revolutionary experiences that they change a man’s whole scale of values and system of ideas.  In such cases, the old order of his habits will be ruptured; and, if the new motives are lasting, new habits will be formed, and build up in him a new or regenerate ‘nature.’

All this kind of fact I fully allow.  But the general laws of habit are no wise altered thereby, and the physiological study of mental conditions still remains on the whole the most powerful ally of hortatory ethics.  The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way.  Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.  We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone.  Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar.  The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson’s play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, “I won’t count this time!” Well, he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being counted none the less.  Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes.  Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.