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.
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.
