Spiritual Teething by Helen Hunt Jackson — Read

Milk for babes; but, when they come to the age for meat of doctrine, teeth must be cut. It is harder work for souls than for bodies; but the processes are wonderfully parallel, -- the results too, alas! If clergymen knew the symptoms of spiritual disease and death, as well as doctors do of disease and death of the flesh, and if the lists were published at end of each year and month and week, what a record would be shown! "Mortality in Brooklyn, or New York, or Philadelphia for the week ending July 7th. " We are so used to the curt heading of the little paragraph that our eye glances idly away from it, and we do not realize its sadness. By tens and by scores they have gone, -- the men, the women, the babies; in hundreds new mourners are going about the streets, week by week. We are as familiar with black as with scarlet, with the hearse as with the pleasure-carriage; and yet "so dies in human hearts the thought of death" that we can be merry.

But, if we knew as well the record of sick and dying and dead souls, our hearts would break. The air would be dark and stifling. We should be afraid to move, -- lest we might hasten the last hour of some neighbor's spiritual breath. Ah, how often have we unconsciously spoken the one word which was poison to his fever!