the nation as never before, and threatening us and our friends, this subject of relaxation and its application is worth careful consideration. Nor in our enthusiasm over mental hygiene must we be misled into forgetting that it includes physical hygiene as well, good food at regular intervals, exercise, sleep, recreation, and whatever else wise nature indicates for the healthy body that is the servant of the healthy mind.

Merely changing wrong physical habits and relieving mental strain will often restore the nervous tone. But to keep it, there must be a correction of the thoughts and an intelligent obedience to all the laws of right living.

One bad habit, however we label it, most of us share in common, that of making conditions. A small boy, afterwards founder of a well-known sanatorium for restoring

nervous people, was on a visit to his grandfather and was tucked at bedtime into the great four-posted bed. His grandfather blew out the candle and climbed up beside him; whereupon the boy with great wailing explained that he wished to blow the candle out himself. The indulgent grandfather hastily relit it and presented it for extinction. But the ungrateful little atom only wailed still louder: "I wanted to blow it out before it was blowed out."

We do not recognize the folly of our own conditions quite so readily, but we find it when our eyes are opened, and we wonder at the infinite patience that keeps on offering us the blessings we so ignorantly push away. These conditions present themselves in all kinds of disguises. "If I did n't have this debt," one says, "I should be so much more

courageous." Yet he must have the courage to win his way out of debt. "If I had a different kind of husband," another says, "I could make a happier home." Yet this is the only husband she can have. "If I were well and strong" is the excuse of the invalid, chronic or temporary, "I should be so amiable and sweet-tempered and helpful." But it is being amiable and sweet-tempered and helpful now, that counts. "If only my children were turning out as I expected," the mothers say, and they seem very excusable in their sweet concern. But, after all, they are only making the conditions that are hindrances. Sometimes the temptation to make conditions is very subtle. "If life were only a succession of our best moments," we exclaim, we should surely be optimists. Of course we should all like to leap from best moment to

best moment with seven league boots, but still, it is the little moments in the valleys, when the vision is hidden and we are searching patiently for the lost moment, that we gather the strength for a better than our last best moment. We all have occasion to remember Matthew Arnold's assurance that The task in hours of insight willed, May be in hours of gloom fulfilled.”

Again, when sorrow lays its hand upon us and we grope in an unfamiliar world which is one great void of loneliness, how we all whisper, "If it had been anything else I could have borne it."

In an old legend the South Wind woos a human maid. To test her he makes himself invisible, and bids her jump to him from a high tree. Her courage falters, and he leaves her. But later, in an hour of supreme

peril, she calls on him, and with glorious abandon casts herself from a great height, only to be caught by his mighty invisible arms and borne away to happiness. Making excuses of inevitable conditions, whatever their form, is only a kind of spiritual tension. Trust like this is its cure. Now is the time we need support, when we are poverty-stricken and tired and discouraged, and sorrowful and ill in mind and body. Now is the time it will help us to believe that neither "time, nor space, nor deep nor high can keep my own away from me." With "if" out of the way, our millennium can begin in the hardest moment of our history.

Anger, hatred, malice, uncharitableness, and suspicion are also forms of spiritual tension; in them we cannot safely indulge.