p. 533 | BRAIN WORRY

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Dec 2, 1880

BRAIN WORRY.

MANY of us pray to be delivered from sudden death, and do we not worry ourselves into it? If we do, can we help it? To most of us it is not given to choose our lives, to avoid the rough places, to gently shoulder to one side disagreeable facts. We must climb over the rocks though they hurt us sore, and the difficulties, however they may annoy us, must be met without fret and wear until they are conquered, or we have passed them. They are as real, living, annoying, as any tangible headache or pain could be; as brushing and irritating as peas in the shoes of pilgrims of old. Nervous health is one thing, and purely physical health is quite another different thing. Calm and steady mental work is conducive to long life; but nervous emotion, mental work that is a constant urging, and at the same time, is an unhinging of the even tenor of the mind, eats away the brain faster than any mental labor, no matter how hard, that is systematic. As men do not really die of heart disease as often as supposed, but of apoplexy, or congestion of the lungs, so they do not die of brain work, but of brain worry.