"I counsel the patient not to make the mistake of supposing that his amendment will necessarily proceed continuously or by equal increments, because this, which is a common notion, will certainly lead to dangerous disappointments. How frequently I have heard people encouraging a self-reformer by such language as this: 'When you have got over the fourth day of abstinence, which suppose to be Sunday, then Monday will find you a trifle better; Tuesday better still--though still it should be only a trifle--and so on. You may at least rely on never going back, you may assure yourself of having seen the worst, and the positive improvements, if trifles separately, must soon gather into a sensible magnitude.' This may be true in a case of short standing, but as a general rule it is perilously delusive. On the contrary, the line of progress, if exhibited in a geometrical construction, would describe an ascending path upon the whole, but with frequent retrocessions into descending curves, which, compared with the point of ascent that had been previously gained and so vexatiously interrupted, would sometimes seem deeper than the original point of starting. This mortifying tendency I can report from experience, many times repeated, with regard to opium, and so unaccountably, as regarded all the previous grounds of expectation, that I am compelled to suppose it a tendency inherent in the very nature of all self-restorations for animal systems.
"I counsel the patient frequently to call back before his thoughts--when suffering sorrowful collapses that seem unmerited by any thing done or neglected--that such, and far worse perhaps, must have been his experience, and with no reversion of hope behind, had he persisted in his intemperate indulgences; _these_ also suffer their own collapses, and (so far as things not co-present can be compared) by many degrees more shocking to the genial instincts. I exhort him to believe that no movement on his own part, not the smallest conceivable, toward the restoration of his healthy state, can by possibility perish. Nothing in this direction is finally lost; but often it disappears and hides itself; suddenly, however, to re-appear, and in unexpected strength, and much more hopefully, because such minute elements of improvement, by re-appearing at a remoter stage, show themselves to have combined with other elements of the same kind, so that equally by their gathering tendency and their duration through intervals of apparent darkness, and below the current of what seemed absolute interruption, they argue themselves to be settled in the system. There is no good gift that does not come from God. Almost his greatest is health, with the peace which it inherits, and man must reap _this_ on the same terms as he was told to reap God's earliest gift, the fruits of the earth, viz., 'in the sweat of his brow,' through labor, often through sorrow, through disappointment, but still through imperishable perseverance, and hoping under clouds when all hope seemed darkened.