True, it requires some judgment to know what, among objects commonly pursued in any department, we really ought to reject; and it requires independence and steadiness to say, "I will not begin to try to do certain things that others are doing, and that, perhaps, they expect of me"; but there comes great leisure and quietness of spirit from the gaps thus made. When the unwieldy clothes-press was once cast out, everything in the log cabin could have room.
A mother, who is anxiously trying to reconcile the watchful care and training of her little ones with the maintenance of fashionable calls and parties, may lose her life in the effort to do both, and do both in so imperfect a manner as never to give her a moment's peace. But on the morrow after she comes to the serious and Christian resolve, "The training of my children is all that I _can_ do well, and henceforth it shall be my _sole_ object," there falls into her tumultuous life a Sabbath pause of peace and leisure. It is true that she is still doing a work in which absolute perfection ever recedes; but she can make relative attainments far nearer the standard than before.
Lastly, under the head of ideality let us resolve to be satisfied with our own past doings, when at the time of doing we used all the light God gave us and did all in our power.
The backward action of ideality is often full as tormenting as its forward and prospective movements. The moment a thing is done and over, one would think that good sense would lead us to drop it like a stone in the ocean; but the morbid idealist cannot cut loose from the past.
"Was that, after all, the _best_ thing? Would it not have been better so or so?" And the self-tormented individual lies wakeful, during weary night-hours, revolving a thousand possibilities, and conjuring up a thousand vague perhapses. "If I had only done so now, perhaps this result would have followed, or that would not"; and as there is never any saying but that so it might have turned out, the labyrinth and the discontent are alike endless.
Now there is grand good sense in the Apostle's direction, "Forgetting the things that are behind, press forward." The idealist should charge himself, as with an oath of God, to let the past alone as an accomplished fact, solely concerning himself with the inquiry, "Did I not do the best I _then_ knew how?"