A minister had a bad habit of exaggeration, which seriously impaired his usefulness. His brethren came to expostulate. With extreme humiliation over this fault as they set it forth, he said, "Brethren, I have long mourned over this fault, and I have shed barrels of tears because of it." They gave him up as incorrigible.
Men carelessly or playfully get into habits of speech or act which become so natural that they speak or act as they do not intend, to their discomfiture. Professor Phelps told of some Andover students, who, for sport, interchanged the initial consonants of adjacent words. "But," said he, "retribution overtook them. On a certain morning, when one of them was leading the devotions, he prayed the Lord to 'have mercy on us, feak and weeble sinners.'" The habit had come to possess him.
Many speakers have undesirable habits of utterance or gesture. Some are continually applying the hand to some part of the face, the chin, the whiskers; some give the nose a peck with thumb and forefinger; others have the habit characterized as,—
"Washing the hands with invisible soap
In a bowl of invisible water."
"We are continually denying that we have habits which we have been practising all our lives," says Beecher. "Here is a man who has lived forty or fifty years; and a chance shot sentence or word lances him, and reveals to him a trait which he has always possessed, but which, until now, he had not the remotest idea that he possessed. For forty or fifty years he has been fooling himself about a matter as plain as the nose on his face."
Had the angels been consulted, whether to create man, with this principle introduced, that, if a man did a thing once, if would be easier the second time, and at length would be done without effort, they would have said, "Create!"
Remember that habit is an arrangement, a principle of human nature, which we must use to increase the efficiency and ease of our work in life.
"Make sobriety a habit, and intemperance will be hateful; make prudence a habit, and reckless profligacy will be as contrary to the course of nature in the child, or in the adult, as the most atrocious crimes are to any of us."
Out of hundreds of replies from successful men as to the probable cause of failure, "bad habits" was in almost every one.
How easy it is to be nobody; it is the simplest thing in the world to drift down the stream, into bad company, into the saloon; just a little beer, just a little gambling, just a little bad company, just a little killing of time, and the work is done.