There is a time when, under the weight of long wearisome years, the human soul has become inflexible, and has no longer the power to raise itself from the slough into which it has sunk.
I felt how I was deteriorating; I felt clearly how the unemployed and uninterested life which I led, nourished day after day new weeds in the waste field of my soul.

Curiosity, a desire for gossip, an inclination to malice and scandal, and an increasing irritability of temper, began to get possession of a mind which nature had endowed with too great a desire for action for it blamelessly to vegetate through a passive life as so many can.

Ah! if people live without an object, they stand as it were on the outside of active life, which gives strength to the inward occupation, even if no noble endeavour or sweet friendship give that claim to daily life which makes it occasionally, at least, a joy to live; disquiet rages fiercely and tumultuously in the human breast, undermining health, temper, goodness, nay, even the quiet of conscience, and conjuring up all the spirits of darkness: so does the corroding rust eat into the steel-plate and deface its clear mirror with a tracery of disordered caricatures.
I once read these words of that many-sided thinker, Steffen:--"He who has no employment to which he gives himself with true earnestness, which he does not love as much as himself and all men, has not discovered the true ground on which Christianity even here brings forth fruit.

Such an occupation becomes a quiet and consecrated temple in all hours of affliction, into which the Saviour pours out his blessing; it unites us with all other men, so that we can sympathise in their feelings, and makes our actions and our wills administer to their wants; it teaches us rightly to weigh our own circumscribed condition and the worth of others.

It is the true, firm, and fruit-bearing ground of real Christianity." These words came like a breath of air on glowing sparks.