Early Rising. [Footnote 251]
[Footnote 251: This article is translated from the Conferences Destinées aux Femmes du Monde, par Mgr. Landriot.]
"De Nocte Surrexit."
Sleep was given man to sustain life, to invigorate his strength, and to serve him as the best and most useful of medicines; one single prescription perfectly accomplished sometimes sufficing for the cure of serious disease, or, at least, the amelioration of violent pain. Sleep is the salutary bath that renovates life, the entire being growing younger under its influence; it is a station in the desert of this world; and often, after dull and wearying journeys, one comes to repose in this oasis prepared by divine Providence, enabled the next day to pursue the route with renewed courage and activity. The time of sleep is not only useful to the body, but the soul: it calms all agitation, spreads a balm over piercing grief, and hinders the precipitation of words and actions. Thus the ancients designated night the good counsellor; those even whom passion or bodily infirmity keep awake are subservient to her designs, and, in the calm which, through shade, she diffuses everywhere, she recalls man to better sentiments. If he is Christian, she quickens within him the fibres of prayer; a single aspiration toward heaven sufficing sometimes to crush the bad or dangerous germs of thought, and prepare for the morrow a pure and uncloudy sky. In other times, there was so much calmness and placidity in the sleep of the just, said St. Ambrose, that it was like an ecstasy in which, while the body reposed, the soul, to speak thus, was separated from its organs, and united itself to Christ: Somnus tranquillitatem menti invehens, placiditatem animae ut tanquam soluto nexu corporis se ablevit, et Christo
[Footnote 252: Ep. xvi. No. 4, p. 960.]
Again, sleep is an excellent preacher, because it recalls to us the image of death: the ancients named it the brother of death, and both are sons of night. The daily arrival of sleep should make us say: "The other brother will come soon, and this time I will extend myself on my bed, never more to rise. Each visit of the night should be an invitation to prepare me for the last and solemn departure."
Sleep is, then, excellent in itself; but how greatly it may be abused; and, if we do abuse it, it will produce effects exactly contrary to those I have just enumerated; that is to say, it will weaken the body, stupefy the ideas, and that, far from refreshing and repairing life, it will prepare for it a kind of living sepulchre in which to bury it.
It is not sufficient to determine the quantity of sleep, which should be wisely regulated, without according or refusing too much to nature. We must also calculate the quality of sleep.