# The Clergyman's Wife and Other Sketches/Perils of Prosperity

PERILS OF PROSPERITY.
erils of prosperity! "Oh, all very fine! but I should like to experience those perils a little," cries an incredulous young friend, quoting from that precocious juvenile who made the same answer to his mother, when she told him that he must abstain from certain amusements which she accounted full of sin and peril.
We all want to experience alluring perils for ourselves, especially those of prosperity. Seemingly, they must be very pleasant to encounter. Who denies that they are? But even the sense of long-protracted pleasure palls and wearies. Uninterrupted prosperity tries the spirit more severely than continuous adversity. You shake your curly head, youthful doubter. You cannot believe that those fair-seeming apples which you hunger to taste, may, like those gathered on the Dead Sea shore, leave only ashes upon your eager lips. Yet we give you high authority for our assertion. Listen to what Jeremy Taylor said: "No man is more miserable than he that hath no adversity; ​that man is not tried whether he be good or bad; and God never crowns. those virtues which are only faculties and dispositions."
It is indisputable that those individuals who have been permitted a long period of unshadowed prosperity, seldom prize their own rich store—are seldom conscious of its opulence—are often as poor in real enjoyment, (we might say poorer) than those who have known great reverses. Shakspeare tells us "they are as sick that surfeit with too much, as they that starve with nothing;" and, in truth, they lose the appetite, and the power of tasting, which gives to the hungry man's simplest food its keen relish.
Let the sun always shine and the tired eye will soon be dazzled by its ceaseless glare, and be blinded to objects rendered beautiful by its radiance. "The rays of happiness, like the light, are colorless when unbroken," writes Longfellow. Untempered sunshine withers the fruits of the intellect, as of the orchard. Clouds, and cooling shadows, and refreshing rain, are as needful for mental as for natural growth. Without them the soil is parched and hardened, and its fairest products wither. Ambition is dwarfed by prosperity, which leaves nothing to seek, nothing to desire. The energies droop like wilted leaves. The soul grows lethargic and feeble, and is in peril of being stricken with what has forcibly been styled a "moral coup de soleil." That cornucopia which ​Page:The Clergyman's Wife.djvu/359 ​Page:The Clergyman's Wife.djvu/360 ​it threatened mental paralysis, which must deprive us of all consciousness of our abundant blessings? if we were certain that it would render us callous to the sufferings of others, if our eyes were once fully opened to half its spiritual perils? Has not adversity better and sweeter uses? Have not the dormant energies of many a mind, which grew weak and sluggish in the Dead Sea calm of prosperity, been electrified into action by the awakening shock of misfortune, the stimulus of sorrow? Has not many a helpless child of luxury risen up transformed by the imperative necessity for exertion, until she marvelled at the unimagined greatness of her own powers? Shall we then deem that perilous amount of prosperity which would stunt our intellects or harden our hearts, a desirable boon? Shall we not rather welcome even adversity, if it open our spirits to all softening and holy influences; if it develop our faculties to their fullest, broadest, highest capacity!