| The Ministry of Comfort |
Chapter 16 |
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For example, one is impatient today in some matter. Tomorrow there is another trial and the impatience is repeated. Thus, on and on, from day to day, with the same result. It begins to be easier to give way to the temptation than to resist it. Again and again the stress is felt and yielded to, and at length we begin to say of the person that he has grown very impatient. That is, he has given way so often to his feelings that impatience has become a habit. If he had resisted the first temptation, restraining himself and keeping himself quiet and sweet in the trial, and then the second, the third, the fourth, the tenth time, had done the same, and had continued to be patient thereafter, whatever the pressure of suffering or irritation, we would have said that he was a patient man. That is, he would have had formed in him at last the fixed habit of patience. As we say again, it would have become “second nature” with him to hold his imperious feelings in check; however he might have been tried. Patience would then have become part of his character.
In like manner all the qualities which make up the disposition are the result of habit. The habit of truthfulness, never deviating in the smallest way from what is absolutely true, yields at length truth in the character. The habit of honesty, insisted upon in all dealings and transactions, fashions the feature of honesty in the life and fixes it there with rocklike firmness.
It is proper, therefore, and no misuse of words, to speak of the habit of happiness. No doubt there is a difference in the original dispositions of people in the quality of cheerfulness or gloom that naturally belongs to them. Some persons are born with a sunny spirit, others with an inclination to sadness. The difference shows itself even in infancy and early childhood. No doubt, too, there is a difference in the influences which affect disposition in the first months and years of life. Some mothers make an atmosphere of joy for their children to grow up in, while others fill their home with complaining, fretfulness, and discontent. Young lives cannot but take something of the tone of the home atmosphere into the disposition with which they pass out of childhood.
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