“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 into 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 only I had 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 enquiry, ‘Did I not do the best I then knew how?’
“The maxim of the quietists is, that when we have acted according to the best light we have, we have expressed the will of God under those circumstances – since, had it been otherwise, more and different light would have been given us; and with the will of God done by ourselves, as by Himself it is our duty to be content.”
H. B. STOWE
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