The third is the rapid and near approach of that crisis on
which all your thoughts and feelings concentrate.
If from all these causes you shall escape and go through triumphantly,
without another "twinge of the soul," I shall be most happily but most
egregiously deceived. If, on the contrary, you shall, as I expect you
will at sometime, be agonized and distressed, let me, who have some
reason to speak with judgment on such a subject, beseech you to ascribe
it to the causes I have mentioned, and not to some false and ruinous
suggestion of the Devil.
"But," you will say, "do not your causes apply to every one engaged in a
like undertaking?" By no means. The particular causes, to a greater or
less extent, perhaps do apply in all cases; but the general one,--nervous
debility, which is the key and conductor of all the particular ones, and
without which they would be utterly harmless,--though it does pertain to
you, does not pertain to one in a thousand. It is out of this that the
painful difference between you and the mass of the world springs.
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