Thus our
habits become our masters, and are the irrevocable rulers of our life. This
is true of good, as well as of bad habits. We come into voluntary
subjection to them, until we shrink from the first proposal to depart from
them.
"Habit," says the Rev. C.C. Colton, "will reconcile us to everything but
change, and even to change, if it recur not too quickly. Milton, therefore,
makes his hell an ice-house, as well as an oven, and freezes his devils at
one period, but bakes them at another. The late Sir George Staunton
informed, me, that he had visited a man in India, who had committed a
murder, and in order not only to save his life, but what was of much more
consequence, his caste, he submitted to the penalty imposed; this was, that
he should sleep for seven years on a bedstead, without any mattress, the
whole surface of which was studded with points of iron resembling nails,
but not so sharp as to penetrate the flesh. Sir George saw him in the fifth
year of his probation, and his skin then was like the hide of a rhinoceros,
but more callous. At that time, however, he could sleep comfortably on his
bed of thorns, and remarked that at the expiration of the term of his
sentence, he should most probably continue that system from choice, which
he had been obliged to adopt from necessity."
This illustrates the force of established habit, and the pliability of our
nature in yielding a voluntary subjection to it.
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