Toward the end of General Bounce, when only four potential spouses, conveniently two of each gender (this is a romance novel of more than a century ago, after all), are left standing, and they have finally sorted out who loves who (see my “General Bounce 1” post), the only major issue left is whether one of the men will die before he marries.
     Earlier, he has been in quite bad shape in the hospital (or “in hospital,” since this is a British novel)   

Of serious thoughts as to his late proximity to another world, of gratitude for his narrow escape from death, we fear we must confess our patient was altogether innocent.

But the author is neither surprised or distressed:

The sick-bed is the last place in the world to promote such grave reflections: and those who trust to an illness as a means of making them better and wiser men, will generally find that they have leant upon a broken reed. The exhaustion of physical pain acts little more upon the body than the mind. The latter partakes of the languor which pervades its tenement, and has generally but strength to pine in helpless inactivity, and gaze idly on the balance of life and death, with scarce a wish even to turn the scale. If a man never reflects when well, still less can he expect to have power to do so when sick; and many a death-bed, we fear, has owned its tranquillity to the mere prostration, intellectual as well as physical, which quiets the departing sufferer. 

     I experienced the same sort of thing three years ago (see Uh-oh; Capacity). I figured . . . I’m in this hospital and nobody’s making any demands on me, so I can spend a bunch of time in reading (mainly Bible) and praying. We’ve all read stories where people in such situations do just that, but I didn’t. I didn’t open a book or even so much as a People magazine and prayed no more than a couple little squeaks. Me not reading is plain weird, but there I was.
     So I’m inclined to agree with the author of General Bounce that those stories of hospital conversions and the like are not about real people.
     That points us back to something that is fundamental about being disciples of Jesus that is often ignored or outright denied because of our love of the easy and spectacular—which is that discipleship happens more in ordinary life than in crisis and more because of the habitual than the single event. See “Hellebore and Religion” for more along that line. 

• George John Whyte-Melville, General Bounce; Or, The Lady and the Locusts (1854). The quotation is from chapter 21 (of 27).