Untitled article by Dr. Bushnell

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Third-day, October 8, 1867

TROUBLE FROM WITHIN.

By Dr. Bushnell

The passionate, ill-natured man lives always in stormy weather, even though it be the quiet of dewfall around him. Always wronged, always hurt, always complaining of some enemy, he has no conception that that enemy is in his own bosom, in the sourness, the ungoverned irritability, the habitual ill-nature of his own bad spirit and character. I speak not here of some single burst of passion, into which a man of amiable temper may, for once, be betrayed; but I speak more especially of the angry characters, always brewing in some tempest of violated feelings. They have a great many enemies, are unaccountably ill-treated, and cannot understand why it is. They have no suspicion that they see and suffer bad things because they are bad, that being ill-natured is about the same thing as receiving ill-treatment, and that all the enemies they suffer from are snugly closeted in their own evil tempers.

The same is true of fretful persons—men and women that wear away fast and die, because they have worried life completely out. Nothing goes right—husband, or wife, or child, or customer, or sermon. They are pricked and stung at every motion they make, and wonder why it is that others are permitted to float along so peacefully, and they never suffered to have a moment of peace in their lives. And the very simple reason is, that life is a field of nettles to them, because their fretful, worrying tempers are always pricking out through the tender skin of their uneasiness. Why, if they were set down in Paradise, carrying their bad minds with them, they would fret at the good angels, and the climate, and the colors even of the roses.—Dr. Bushnell.