"LIFE'S FITFUL FEVER."

Evening Post, Volume LXXIII, Issue 28, 2 February 1907, Page 9

"LIFE'S FITFUL FEVER."

•ODD SYMPTOMS! (By Dr. F. H. Charity.) ABOUT MISTAKES. Apparently it is always the other fellow that makes mistakes. "I never make mistakes, I am too careful, ' tho averago person says, quite forgetting that the other average person has a similar belief. D eople somehow seem to fancy that the admission of a mistake is about ' as advisable as taking a dose of strych- I nine. They are mistaken. It is a mis- j take not to make a mistake now and then. The world was built up on mis- ] takes in a way. The path to Hades J may bo paved with mistakes, but so is j the path to heaven. I May it be repeated that it is good to j makea mistake once in a while, even if it is only to encourage the others. The \ perfect people die nated. The individuals who have no faults, who never hive their calm sea of patience ruffled, are tiresome sometimes. The infinitely j good are not human. One suspects them of a disease which takes all the effervescence out of their composition. It is • common tale that the most righteous j — that is the righteous according to cer- j tain rules of life (which may be wrong, j for it is all a matter of opinion) — have often ,the least sympathy. They make no slips, they think, and therefore they ' have little tolerance for slips. They turn- acid. They cast tho first stone at tho fallen. This is a truth which tho ■world's writers (not including Dr. Charity), havo often demonstrated. Even fair women, who may have a horror of sin, often have an aversion for the "perfect" man, the individual who does everything -right according to the code of the particular country of the particular generation of which he is a member. They are machines of morality, and deserve credit just in the same degree for working smoothly as a wellgroozned donkey-engine does. Let not the sinner take fresh heart of i grace from that comment and turn him to his darkness cheerfully. He has always to remember in hte site the one rule that is the fosndatioa of all right Teligions — and .there are many right ones, , ancient end modern — '-Love thy neigh- j bour as thyself. This do and thou shalt j live." I Somehow tho writer has made a mistake. Ha has drifted into a different train of thought from the one in which h.a booked a passage, .lie hes entangled himself in a moral or 'immoral skeiu, and doas not know whether he is wrong or right. He intended merely doveloping the sabjezt of casual mechanical mistakes, bub found himself tinkering with "great issues,"., as they are called, in. the first lap. But all writers do that. Irrelevancy is the basis of veTy much writing, fortunately. There are many aathoTs who would' be unspeakably dull if they kept the' course which they set themselves at tho outset, i' fid there are speakers who nhould be shot at eight if on the platform or beside the dinner-table they meandered along the track which they had mapped out for theiEselves in the studio. How often do you hear a man exclaim: —"I couldn't think of a. word I meant to 6ay. It all slipped out of my mind like ■water out of a sieve." Lucky man, lucky audience. It js *j^rfnl,,torftr ?f ,fcr.j ; th& qqs(torium at «i banquet when a man does rem&mber all that ho intended to say. It is a mistake to remember speeches that have been stewed in the studio. By the time that they Teach the populace they are like warmed-up cabbage. Ifc is better to forget and serve up trifle, a mess of pottage of weird ingredients, perhaps, but fresh. Thus a man often thinks that a dip of the memory is his ruin, whereas it is his salvation. The writer has made another mistake. When he started that last paragraph, he intended plunging rignt into the whole theory of mistakes, but £c was sidetracked by points that somehow thrust themselves on the main trunk line. But that is the whole theory of life for mqab of us. We are travelling to a station a lung way ahead, a beautiful station, but we are forever getting into sidings, till we finally land into one which is very narrow, and only two yards long. Perhaps it is best, after all, that we strike the sidings, for the scenery along the line is often better than the view at the goal. , Jkh. Loyal mulct thou and I with Fate conepire, To grasp thia sorry Scheme of Things entire. Would we not shatter it to bite — and then Be-mould it nearer. 1 to thft Heart's Desire? Quoting that quatrain to me the other day, a friend said he could not understand why man was not constructed with three legs, or with two legs and a tail, something like a kangaroo's, for it would be then more comfortable to stand up. I answered that I would rather have one leg and two tails, because then there vrould be only one boot for myself or a servant to clean ihis gossip is merely mentioned as an instance of the theories that are advanced about the anatomy of man. Many persons maintain stoutly that man ts absolutely a mistake. Ho has trouble, they say, in getting his teeth, he has trouble while he has them, he has trouble in losing them. They affirm that man's toes are purely superfluities, merely fields on which the corn nrar- luxuriate. Why should man have each complicated machinery for keeping death at bay, they ask 1 The game is not ■worth it, they declare. Life is so short that it is hardly worth while getting up in the morning, they complain. Veep down in his heart every matt and woman has a theory abo at the world in which the human frame, physical and psychical, »hoald b* cast, but they are all wrong, they are all mistakes. Any one with' even a little knowledge of the world must have noticed a man here and there who had a marvellous capacity for cgcpping punishment for mistakes. Ho somehow has ability to convince the sceptics that they aro wrong m and he is right, and this only goes to " show that mistakes," after all, aro often only a matter of point of view. We arc all always nwking^mistakes in somebody's eye and somebouy is, always making mistakes in ours. We are mostly in a hurry, a feverish hurry, to point to mistakes in our fellows, to sit in judgment on them and summarily convict them of error, just as they convict us. It is very childish, but it is bn/nan nature.