Religion And Health
by James J. Walsh · English · Gutenberg #37032 · 608,672 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Religion And Health
Author: James J. Walsh
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Language: English
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[Transcriber's Notes]
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braces, e.g. {99}. They have been located where page breaks occurred
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This book is derived from a copy on the Internet Archive:
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[End Transcriber's Notes]
RELIGION AND HEALTH
BY
JAMES J. WALSH, M.D., Ph.D., Sc.D. etc.
MEDICAL DIRECTOR OF FORDHAM UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF SOCIOLOGY,
PROFESSOR OF PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY, CATHEDRAL COLLEGE
LECTURER ON PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY, MARYWOOD COLLEGE,
SCRANTON, PA., MT. ST. MARY'S, PLAINFIELD, N.J.
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1920
_Copyright, 1920_,
By Little, Brown, and Company.
_All rights reserved_
Published October, 1920
_Norwood Press_
Set up and electrotyped by J. S. Cushing Co.,
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
To
HIS EMINENCE JAMES CARDINAL GIBBONS
AN EXEMPLAR OF RELIGION AND HEALTH
FOR OUR GENERATION
CONTENTS
Page
Introduction 1
CHAPTER
I Can We Still Believe? 8
II Prayer 33
III Sacrifice 59
IV Charity 80
V Fasting and Abstinence 109
VI Holydays and Holidays 120
VII Recreation and Dissipation 132
VIII Mortification 147
IX Excesses 168
X Purity 184
XI Insanity 205
XII Nervous Disease 217
XIII Dreads 234
XIV Suffering 254
XV Pain 265
XVI Suicide and Homicide 277
XVII Longevity 294
XVIII The Bible and Health 306
XIX Health and Religion 319
Index 333
{1}
RELIGION AND HEALTH
INTRODUCTION
Physicians are agreed that there is no entirely satisfactory
definition for health. We all know quite well what we mean when we use
the word, but it does not admit of such exact limitations as would
make a scientific formulation of its meaning. Religion is another of
the words which, in spite of its common use, is extremely difficult to
define exactly, and it has often been said that we have no definition
that will satisfy all those who profess religion and certainly not all
those who have made a study of it from the standpoint of the science
of theology. As is true of health, each of us knows pretty thoroughly
what we mean when we use the word, though our definitely formulated
signification for it might not meet with the approval of others,
especially of those who are exacting in their requirements. With the
two principal words in the title incapable of exact definition, it
might seem that the subject matter of this book would be rather vague
at best and unpromising in practical significance. But all this
indefiniteness is in theory. There are no two words in the language
that are more used than health and religion, none that are less vague
in practice and no two subjects have a wider appeal or a more
paramount interest. The linking them together for discussion in common
because of their mutual influence will serve to {2} throw light on
both of them and undoubtedly help toward a better understanding of
each.
Ordinarily the most satisfactory definition of a word can be obtained
from its etymology. Unfortunately in the matter of religion there is a
very old-time division of opinion as to the derivation of the word
which makes etymology of less definite significance than usual. Cicero
suggested that _religio_ came from _relegere_, to go through or over
again in reading, speech or thought, as prayers and religious
observances generally are repeated. On the other hand St. Augustine
and Lactantius insisted on deriving _religio_ from the Latin verb
_religare_, which means to bind again, to bind back, to bind fast. The
word obligation has an analogous origin and illustrates the meaning of
religion as if its form from etymology should have been religation.
It is this latter derivation that has been most commonly accepted in
the modern time. A man may recognize the existence of God and yet not
feel any particular obligations toward Him, but if he binds himself
anew to the deity whom he recognizes, by trying to make his life
accord with the divine will as he views it, then he practices
religion. James Martineau said, "By religion I understand the belief
and worship of Supreme Mind and Will, directing the universe and
holding moral relations with human life."
What will occupy us in this book is the effect of this profound
feeling and sense of obligation toward a higher power on health, that
is, on that wholeness of body and mind which constitutes a normal
condition for human beings.
There are many more relations between the two words than would at
first be suspected or that most people {3} might think possible. The
old high German word _haelu_ or _haelo_, from which our word health is
derived, meant also salvation. The original root _hal_ means haleness
or wholeness and also refers to healing, and curiously enough the word
holiness is derived from the same root. Holiness has now come to refer
to perfection, or at least normality of soul, while health refers to
normality of body. Our word health is related more directly to whole
than it is to heal, in spite of the feeling there might be because of
the spelling that the latter word must represent its immediate origin.
Holiness of soul exactly corresponds in etymology with wholeness of
body.
Cardinal Newman would, I suppose, be an authority on the subject of
religion as satisfying for most people as could be found. In his
"Grammar of Assent", which he wrote in order to define as exactly as
might be possible just how men came to admit certain propositions with
special reference to the acceptance of religion, he gave a definition
of what he meant by the word in as simple words as it is possible to
use, perhaps, to express so large a subject. He said: "By religion I
mean the knowledge of God, of His Will, and of our duties toward Him."
Matthew Arnold, who represents among English-speaking peoples almost
the opposite pole of thought to Cardinal Newman, in what concerns
religion, suggested in "Literature and Dogma" that "Religion, if we
follow the intention of human thought and human language in the use of
the word, is ethics heightened, enkindled, lit up by feeling; the
passage from morality to religion is made when to morality is applied
emotion." Both of these men, in spite of their distance apart, insist
on duty as the essence of religion. Matthew Arnold calls it ethics and
says nothing as to the foundation of it; the great English {4}
Cardinal speaks very simply of our duties toward God. Newman says
nothing of the emotions but appeals only to the reason, while,
curiously enough, the rationalizer in religion emphasizes the
emotions.
Between these two definitions there is a world of difference that we
shall not attempt to bridge, for we want to treat of the relations and
above all the interaction of religion and health in the widest sense
of these terms. The "Century Dictionary" definition more nearly
resembles that of Cardinal Newman than Matthew Arnold's formula, but
it generalizes in a way that would describe the practice of religion
for a greater number of people and especially for those who still
believe that there are more gods than one. It runs: "Recognition of
and allegiance in manner of life to a superhuman power or superhuman
powers, to whom allegiance and service are regarded as justly due."
Even this definition is not too broad for the subject matter of this
book, for I am one of those who believe that there is a blessing on
every sincere effort of worship of the Higher Power, no matter how
groping it may be. Above all, every regulation of life with reference
to a power above us felt to have a Providence over the world in which
we live has an almost inevitable reaction on health and will lead to
better things. The sincere pursuit of good conduct as an end in life
under a Providence that is recognized will almost necessarily lead to
better knowledge of our relations to the higher powers, and also of
our relations to ourselves and the world around us.
With these preliminaries we are ready to consider religion and health
and their mutual influence, but the inevitable question that suggests
itself is, "Is religion a living force in our time? Has not science
given it its {5} death blow? While it walks the earth as yet, is it
not only as the ghost of an outworn phase of human interest? Is it any
more than merely a superstition in the sense once suggested as the
etymology of this word by James Russell Lowell as if derived from
_superstes_, a survivor, representing, as all superstitions do, a
survival from a previous state of thinking, the reasons for which have
disappeared, though the mental inertia of human beings still keeps
them in vogue?" A good many people in our time, including not a few
of those who are rather prone to consider themselves above the rest of
the world, have not hesitated to express the view that it is only old
fogies and especially those ignorant of modern science who continue to
think that religion can still be taken seriously. Some few of them
have the best of good will in the world and appreciate how much of
benefit was derived from religious belief, benefit which they confess
did good both for the mind and the body of man; and they are even
ready to express sorrow that it has outlived its usefulness, but they
feel that they must insist that religion is now only the wraith of its
former self, a misty congeries of old-fashioned beliefs which the
ignorant alone reverence, accepting it very much as they do ghost
stories in general.
President Schurman of Cornell in an address before the Liberal Club of
Buffalo thirty years ago, [Footnote 1] reminded us that there are a
number of people who are always ready to proclaim the end of religion
and to weep for it. Religion continues to be as living a force and as
lively as ever in spite of their proclamations, and this has been true
generation after generation practically since the beginning of
Christianity. President Schurman said:
{6}
"Every now and then we hear the requiem of religion chanted alike by
the spirits who mock and by the pious souls who have 'no language
but a cry.' I suppose we shall always have professional mourners.
But it is greatly to be desired that their services should not be
prematurely given. If there is anything in the world that is alive
and active, it is just this religious spirit, for whose demise
certain mourners go about the streets. The body of religion changes,
the spirit and the life abide forever. To the assertion that
religion is defunct, I reply by pointing to the intense interest
which men to-day everywhere feel in religion. It was recently stated
by a Massachusetts Judge--Burke observed truly that we Americans
like to appeal to the law--that there is nothing in the world
perennially interesting but religion. The ground of this dictum is
to be found in the constitution of humanity; for the human soul
which the things of sense fail to satisfy can attain its true home
and its complete self-realization only in conscious communion with
the Spirit behind the veil."
[Footnote 1: "Agnosticism," Scribners, New York, 1895. ]
The recent death of Mrs. Humphry Ward recalled the experience with
regard to her book "Robert Elsmere." In a certain narrow circle of
intellectuals it was supposed that this novel represented a veritable
death blow to a series of compromises which had permitted people
familiar with modern progress and science, and especially with the
higher criticism, to continue to practice their religion in peace in
spite of the fact that belief had long since departed. How amusing it
is now and indeed how almost incomprehensible to learn that Mrs.
Humphry Ward's husband, a well-known English critic, suggested shortly
after its publication that her novel had {7} "shaken the very pillars
of Christianity." It is surprising indeed how often the foundations of
religion are supposed to have been completely undermined, and yet the
edifice itself continues to stand and to be the shelter for the vast
majority of mankind from the buffetings of a world that without it
would be almost shelterless for them and a place of trial too hard to
bear.
Men are incurably religious, and just as no tribe has been found,
however low in the scale of savagery, which has not formulated for
itself some system of worship of a higher power and definite feelings
of dependence on it, so even those whose minds under the influence of
certain phases of intellectual development lead them away from formal
religion find deep in their hearts the belief and appreciation of
their relations to a power that makes for good, even though it may be
difficult to understand the mystery of it. Long ago the Scriptural
expression was formulated that only the fool who thinketh not in his
heart says there is no God. Due acknowledgment of the thought in
practice, however imperfect it may be, is religion.
Religion has been with us for all the period that we know anything
about man, for the very cave man buried his dead with manifest
confidence in a hereafter, and there seems no doubt that it will be
with us until this stage of mundane affairs has passed. It affects the
body as well as the mind, as indeed do all the great modes of thought,
and it deserves to be cultivated, not only for its effect on the soul
but also on the mind and heart and the bodily powers. There is no
doubt at all that it means very much, and there is only the question
of facing its significance for the whole man candidly and
straightforwardly.
{8}
CHAPTER I
CAN WE STILL BELIEVE?
There is no doubt that man's quite instinctive attitude toward the
mystery which surrounds him, out of which he came and into which he
goes, has always so influenced his attitude of mind toward his body
and its processes as to affect them deeply. The medicine man with his
appeal to the religious as well as the superstitious feelings of man
always had a potent influence over the most primitive of mankind, but
culture has not obliterated this source of special reaction in men.
Even now, for the great majority of men it still remains true that no
matter how vague their religious instinct may be, it continues to
affect, to a notable extent, their physiological and psychological
functions. An eclipse of the religious instinct is at the basis of the
increase in suicide and also undoubtedly of insanity in our day. The
lack of an abiding faith in Providence is the source of many dreads
and worries that affect health. Every physician is sure to know of
highly educated patients whose ills reflect their mental relation to
the mystery of life and whose symptoms take on or lose significance,
according to their religious feelings.
The question that in our time, however, is coming insistently into a
great many minds is, Can we, as intelligent human beings, reasonably
in touch with man's recent progress in science, be fair with ourselves
and still continue {9} to believe in the great religious truths that
affected our ancestors so deeply? While we may realize all the depth
of the mystery in the midst of which we are, can we, with our little
minds, hope to fathom any of it? This is the questioning feeling that
will not down for a certain number of those who have had educational
advantages. Must we not just confess our inability to, know anything
definite in reality with regard to it, and feel that those who have
thought that they held the key of the mystery were deluding themselves
or allowing themselves to be caught by pseudo-knowledge, an
inheritance from unthinking generations, instead of realities?
Has not the modern advance in science made it very clear to us that
all we can hope to say of man's origin and man's destiny is that we do
not know just what all this mystery that surrounds us is about? Will
not this very rational attitude of mind preclude at least the educated
intelligent people of our generation from having their health affected
in any way by their religion? Above all, if religion is to influence
health, must there not be some regular practice of it, and have not
the scientists of the last generation made it quite clear that this is
out of the question in any sincere and serious way for any one who
knows enough of science and appreciates the present position of our
knowledge of the facts of the relationship of man to the universe?
For a large and growing number of people, as the result of the
prevalence of this impression, the practice of religion seems to be an
interesting but entirely worn-out relic of an older generation when
folk were more easily satisfied with regard to such things than we are
in our enlightened scientific era. Religion is surely not something
that our contemporaries, with their broader {10} outlook on the
meaning of life, can be brought to conform to very readily. The
question "Can We Still Believe?" would seem then to have for answer in
our time at best, "Speculatively, perhaps yes! but practically, no!"
We may still feel the religious instinct, but we can scarcely be
expected to acknowledge religious obligations in any such strictness
as would demand in our already overstrenuous daily life with its many
duties the devotion of time to religious exercises. We surely cannot
be expected to assume any additional obligations or rebind ourselves
to a divinity who seems to be getting farther away from us.
Almost needless to say, if all this be true, then religion can have,
in our time, only a very slight and quite negligible influence on
health. Men may be incurably religious in the mass, as yet, but this
instinct is manifestly passing, for the educated at least, and for
sensible people is now without any significance for physical
processes, though it may at times even yet affect psychological
states.
There is only one fair and practical way to reply to this question
"Can We Still Believe?" especially for those who think that modern
science has obscured the answer, and that is to turn to the lives of
the men who made our modern science and see how they answered it in
their definite relations to religion. The surprise is to find that
while so many people, and not a few of them professors in colleges and
even universities, are of the very often expressed opinion that
science makes men irreligious or at least unreligious, that is not
true at all of our greatest scientists. Most of the men who have done
the great work of modern science have been deeply religious, and a
great many of them have practiced their {11} religion very faithfully.
It is true that not a few of the lesser lights in science have been
carried away by the impression that science was just about to explain
everything, and there was no longer any need of a creator or creation
or of Providence, but that is only because of their own limitations.
Francis Bacon, himself a distinguished thinker in science, declared
some three hundred years ago that his own feeling was that a little
philosophy takes men away from God, but a sufficiency of philosophy
brings them back. His opinion has often been reached by our deepest
thinkers in the modern time, and it is just as true for natural
philosophy as it was for the metaphysical philosophy of the older
time, for Bacon's aphorism had been more than once anticipated in the
early days of Christianity, notably by St. Augustine, and it would not
be hard to find quotations from Greek thinkers along the same line.
The Scriptures said very emphatically, "Only the fool who thinketh not
in his heart says there is no God."
While young scientists then are so prone to feel that science and
religion are in opposition, and a certain number of scientific workers
never seem to outgrow their youthfulness in this regard, it must not
be forgotten that the greatest scientists of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries have practically all been firm believers in
religion. Lord Kelvin, at the beginning of the twentieth century, at
the moment when he was looked up to by all the world as the greatest
of living physical scientists, did not hesitate to say that "science
demonstrates the existence of a Creator." As president of the British
Association for the Advancement of Science he declared: "But strong,
overpowering proofs of intelligent and benevolent design lie all
around us; and if ever {12} perplexities, whether metaphysical or
scientific occur, they turn us away with irresistible force, showing
to us, through nature, the influence of free will, and teaching us
that all living beings depend on one ever-acting Creator and Ruler."
Once when particularly disgusted with the materialistic views of those
who, while denying the existence of the Creator, attributed the
wonders of nature, animate and inanimate, to the potency of a
fortuitous concourse of atoms, Lord Kelvin wrote to Liebig, the great
chemist, asking him if a leaf or a flower could be formed or even made
to grow by chemical forces, and received the emphatic reply, "I would
more readily believe that a book on chemistry or on botany could grow
out of dead matter by chemical processes."
Expressions similar to those of Lord Kelvin and Liebig are
commonplaces in the history of science. Sir Humphry Davy declared,
"The true chemist sees God in all the manifold forms of the external
world." Linnaeus, to whom the modern world confesses that it owes so
much in the organization of botanical science, once exclaimed in what
has well been called a spirit of rapture:
"I have traced God's footprints in the works of His creation; and in
all of them, even in the least, and in those that border on
nothingness, what power, what wisdom, what ineffable perfection!"
It would be very easy to make a long list of extremely great
scientists who were firm believers. Clerk Maxwell once said to a
friend, "I have read up many queer religions; there is nothing like
the old one after all; and I have looked into most philosophical
systems, and I have seen that none will work without a God." Pasteur
declared in his address before the French Academy, when {13} admitted
as a member, "Blessed is the man who has an ideal of the virtues of
the Gospel and obeys it." He had once said, impatient at the
pretensions of pseudo-scientists: "Posterity will one day laugh at the
sublime foolishness of the modern materialistic philosophy. The more I
study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator. I
pray while I am engaged at my work in the laboratory."
Kepler, the great astronomer to whom we owe so many significant basic
discoveries, once said:
"The day is near at hand when one shall know the truth in the book
of nature as in the Holy Scriptures, and when one shall rejoice in
the harmony of both revelations."
Sir Isaac Newton, whose modesty was equaled only by the magnitude of
his discoveries, was so impressed with his own littleness in the
contemplation of the wonderful works of God that he declared, a short
time before his death, "I seem to have been only like a boy playing on
the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother
pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of
truth lay all undiscovered before me."
Dumas, the great French chemist, for many years the secretary of the
French Academy of Sciences, once suggested the great difference there
is in the matter of religious belief between the original worker in
science and those who know their science only at second-hand. Those
who have acquired their knowledge of science easily have no idea of
the difficulties which the original investigator had to encounter and
how deep are the mysteries which he knows lie all around him. The
second-hand scientist becomes conceited over his {14} knowledge, but
the original investigator becomes humble. Dumas said:
"People who only exploit the discoveries of others, and who never
make any themselves, greatly exaggerate their importance, because
they have never run against the mysteries of science which have
checked real savants. Hence their irreligion and their infatuation.
It is quite different with people who have made discoveries
themselves. They know by experience how limited their field is, and
they find themselves at every step arrested by the incomprehensible.
Hence their religion and their modesty. Faith and respect for
mysteries is easy for them. The more progress they make in science,
the more they are confounded by the infinite."
Professor P. G. Tait, professor of natural philosophy at Edinburgh
University for the last forty years of the nineteenth century, and who
was the co-author with Lord Kelvin of Thomson's and Tait's "Natural
Philosophy" (the well-known T+T) summed up the question of the
supposed conflict of religion and science rather strikingly and in a
way that makes it easy to comprehend many modern misunderstandings. He
said:
"The assumed incompatibility of Religion and Science has been so
often confidently asserted in recent times that it has come to be
taken for granted by writers of leading articles, etc., and it is,
of course, perpetually thrust by them broadcast before their too
trusting readers.
"But the whole thing is a mistake, and a mistake so grave that no
true scientific man (unless indeed he be literally a
specialist--such as a pure mathematician, or a mycologist or
entomologist) runs, in Britain at least, the smallest risk of making
it.
"When we ask of any competent authority who are the {15} 'advanced',
the best, and the ablest scientific thinkers of the immediate past
(in Britain), we cannot but receive for answer such names as
Brewster, Faraday, Forbes, Graham, Rowan Hamilton, Herschel, and
Talbot. This must be the case unless we use the word 'science' in a
perverted sense. Which of these great men gave up the idea that
Nature evidences a Designing Mind?"
Lord Rayleigh, the physicist and mathematician, professor of
experimental physics at Cambridge and then Tyndall's successor as
professor of natural philosophy at the Royal Institution, who, after
having been secretary of the Royal Society for some ten years, was
elected to what has been called the highest official position in the
scientific world--the presidency of the Royal Society--wrote in
answer to a question: [Footnote 2] "I am not able to write you at
length, but I may say that in my opinion true Science and true
Religion neither are nor could be opposed.
"A large number of 'leading scientists' are not irreligious or
anti-Christian. Witness: Faraday, Maxwell, Stokes, Kelvin, and a large
number of others less distinguished."
[Footnote 2: I owe this and a number of other quotations in this
chapter to Tabrum "Religious Beliefs of Scientists," London, 1911.]
Practically all the men whose names are connected with the evolution
of electricity in the nineteenth century were thorough-going believers
in revealed religion. Galvani, Volta, Coulomb, Ohm, Ampere, Oersted,
Faraday, Sir Humphry Davy, and many others are among the believers.
Faraday once declared when the dark shadow of death was creeping over
him, "I bow before Him who is the Lord of all, and hope to be kept
waiting patiently for His time and mode of releasing me, {16}
according to His divine word and the great and precious promises
whereby His people are made partakers of the divine nature."
Earlier in life, in the very maturity of the intellectual powers which
made him immortal in science, lest perhaps some one should suggest
that he had lost his mental grasp toward the end, he said: "When I
consider the multitude of associate forces which are diffused through
nature; when I think of that calm and tranquil balancing of their
energies which enables elements, most powerful in themselves, most
destructive to the world's creatures and economy, to dwell associated
together and be made subservient to the wants of creation, I rise from
the contemplation more than ever impressed with the wisdom, the
beneficence, and grandeur beyond our language to express, of the Great
Disposer of all!"
It would be easy to multiply quotations such as this from the great
original workers in modern electricity. Hans Christian Oersted, for
instance, the great Danish scientist, to whom we owe the discovery of
the "magnetic effect" of the electric current, the demonstration of
the intimate relationship between magnetism and electricity, whose
name all Europe rang with in the early part of the nineteenth century,
was a man of really great genius and scientific penetration and yet of
deeply fervent piety. He did not hesitate to say that genuine
knowledge of science necessarily produced a feeling of religious piety
towards the Creator. Lord Kelvin once quoted some words of his in this
regard on a memorable occasion, which are particularly to our purpose
here:
"If my purpose here was merely to show that science necessarily
engenders piety, I should appeal to the great truth everywhere
recognized, that the essence of all {17} religion consists in love
toward God. The conclusion would then be easy, that love of Him from
whom all truth proceeds must create the desire to acknowledge truth
in all her paths; but as we desire here to recognize science herself
as a religious duty, it will be requisite for us to penetrate deeper
into its nature. It is obvious, therefore, that the searching eye of
man, whether he regards his own inward being or the creation
surrounding him, is always led to the eternal source of all things.
In all inquiry, the ultimate aim is to discover that which really
exists and to contemplate it in its pure light apart from all that
deceives the careless observer by only a seeming existence. The
philosopher will then comprehend what, amidst ceaseless change, is
the Constant and Uncreated, which is hidden behind unnumbered
creations, the bond of union which keeps things together in spite of
their manifold divisions and separations. He must soon acknowledge
that the independent can only be the constant and the constant the
independent, and that true unity is inseparable from either of
these. And thus it is in the nature of thought that it finds no
quiet resting place, no pause, except in the invariable, eternal,
uncaused, all causing, all comprehensive Omniscience.
"But, if this one-sided view does not satisfy him, if he seeks to
examine the world with the eye of experience, he perceives that all
those things of whose reality the multitude feels most assured never
have an enduring existence, but are always on the road between birth
and death. If he now properly comprehends the whole array of nature,
he perceives that it is not merely an idea of an abstract notion, as
it is called; but that reason and the power to which everything is
indebted for its essential nature are only the revelation of a
self-sustained Being. How can {18} he, when he sees this, be
otherwise animated than by the deepest feeling of humility, of
devotion and of love? If any one has learned a different lesson from
his observation of nature, it could only be because he lost his way
amidst the dispersion and variety of creation and had not looked
upwards to the eternal unity of truth."
The great contemporary and colleague of Oersted in the demonstration
of the intimate relations between magnetism and electricity who was
quite as outspoken as the Danish scientist in his recognition of the
relations of science and religion, was the Frenchman Ampere, whose
name was chosen as a term for one of the units of electrical science,
because of his great original work in extending our knowledge of
electricity. This choice of his name was made by an international
congress of scientists who felt that he deserved this very great
honor. Ozanam, to whose thoroughly practical Christianity while he was
professor of foreign literatures at the University of Paris we owe the
foundation of the Conferences of St. Vincent de Paul, which so long
anticipated the "settlement work" of the modern time and have done so
much for the poor in large cities ever since, who was very close to
Ampere and indeed lived with him for a while, said that, no matter
where conversations with him began, they always led up to God. The
great French scientist and philosopher used to take his broad forehead
between his hands after he had been discussing some specially deep
question of science or philosophy and say: "How great is God, Ozanam;
How great is God and how little is our knowledge." Of course this has
been the feeling of most profound thinkers at all times. St.
Augustine's famous vision of the angel standing by the sea emptying it
out with a teaspoon, which has been rendered so living {19} for most
of us by Botticelli's great picture, is but an earlier example of the
same thing. One of Ampere's greatest contemporaries, Laplace, reechoed
the same sentiment, perhaps in less striking terms, when he declared
that "What we know is but little; while what we do not know is
infinite."
Writing of Ampere after his death Ozanam, who knew him best, brought
out this extremely interesting union of intellectual qualities, his
science, his faith, his charity to the poor which was proverbial, and
the charming geniality of his character, as well as his manifold human
interests, in a passage that serves very well to sum up the meaning of
the great Frenchman's life.
"In addition to his scientific achievements this brilliant genius
has other claims upon our admiration and affection.... It was
religion which guided the labors of his mind and illuminated his
contemplations; he judged all things, science itself, by the exalted
standard of religion.... This venerable head which was crowned by
achievements and honors, bowed without reserve before the mysteries
of faith, down even below the line which the Church has marked for
us. He prayed before the same altars before which Descartes and
Pascal had knelt; beside the poor widow and the small child who may
have been less humble in mind than he was. Nobody observed the
regulations of the Church more conscientiously, regulations which
are so hard on nature and yet so sweet in the habit. Above all
things, however, it is beautiful to see what sublime things
Christianity wrought in his great soul; this admirable simplicity,
the unassumingness of a mind that recognized everything except its
own genius; this high rectitude in matters of science, now so rare,
seeking nothing but the truth and never {20} rewards and
distinction; the pleasant and ungrudging amiability; and lastly, the
kindness with which he met every one, especially young people. I can
say that those who know only the intelligence of the man, know only
the less perfect part. If he thought much, he loved more."
Ohm, after whom another of the units of electricity is named, was
another of the scientists who realized very clearly the existence of
Providence and in one very disappointing circumstance in life, when he
found that some of his work at which he had spent much time was
completely anticipated by a Norwegian investigator, he said very
simply, "Man proposes but God disposes"; and he chronicled the fact
that without the bait of this discovery which he vaguely foresaw at
the beginning he would not have taken up the work, and yet during the
time when he was at it "A number of things of which I had no hint at
all at the beginning of my researches have come to take the place of
my original purpose and compensate for it." When he undertook his next
work he foresaw that he might not be able to finish it; he had hoped
against hope that he would, and in the preface to the first volume he
declared that he would devote himself to it at every possible
opportunity and that he hoped and prayed that "God would spare him to
complete it." This simplicity of confidence in the Almighty is indeed
a striking characteristic of the man of whose discovery of the law of
electricity Lord Kelvin declared that it was such an extremely simple
expression of a great truth that its significance is probably not
confined to that department of physical phenomena, but it is a law of
nature in some much broader way. Professor George Chrystal of
Edinburgh in his article on electricity in the "Encyclopaedia
Britannica" (IX Edition) says that {21} Ohm's law must now be allowed
to rank with the law of gravitation and the elementary laws of
statical electricity as a _law of nature_ in the strictest sense.
Volta, whom the international congress of electricity so deservedly
honored by giving his name to one of the units of electricity, is the
genius who first constructed an instrument which would give a
continuous flow of electricity. The Voltaic pile is a very great
invention. Volta was much more, however, than merely an ingenious
inventor. He was a great scientist who made discoveries not only in
electricity but in various other branches of physical science. He was
one of the eight foreign members of the French Institute, Knight
Commander of the Legion of Honor, one of the first members of the
Italian Academy and the gold medalist of the French Academy. There was
nothing he touched in his work that he did not illuminate.
His was typically the mind of the genius, ever reaching out beyond the
boundaries of the known,--an abundant source of leading and light for
others. Far from being a doubter in matters religious, his scientific
greatness seemed only to make him readier to submit to what are
sometimes spoken of as the shackles of faith, though to him belief
appealed as a completion of knowledge of things beyond the domain of
sense or the ordinary powers of intellectual acquisition.
In Volta's time as in our own some of the less important workers in
science had their faith disturbed by their knowledge of science and
attributed that result to science rather than to the limitations of
their own minds. One of them declared that though Volta continued to
practice his religion, this was more because he did not want to offend
friends and did not care to scandalize his {22} neighbors and
especially the poor folk around him in his country home, whom he did
not want to be led by his example into giving up what he knew to be
the most fruitful source of consolation in the trials of life, rather
than because of sincere conviction. Volta, having heard this report,
deliberately wrote out his confession of faith, so that all the world
of his own and the after time might know it. When he wrote it he was
just approaching his sixtieth year and was in the full maturity of his
powers. He lived for twelve years afterwards, looked up to as one of
the great thinkers of Europe and as one of the most important men of
Italy in his time.
"If some of my faults and negligences may have by chance given
occasion to some one to suspect me of infidelity, I am ready, as
some reparation for this and for any other good purpose, to declare
to such a one and to every other person and on every occasion and
under all circumstances that I have always held, and hold now, the
Holy Catholic Religion as the only true and infallible one, thanking
without end the good God for having gifted me with such a faith, in
which I firmly propose to live and die, in the lively hope of
attaining eternal life. I recognize my faith as a gift of God, a
supernatural faith. I have not, on this account, however, neglected
to use all human means that could confirm me more and more in it and
that might drive away any doubt which could arise to tempt me in
matters of faith. I have studied my faith with attention as to its
foundations, reading for this purpose books of apologetics as well
as those written with a contrary purpose, and trying to appreciate
the arguments pro and contra. I have tried to realize from what
sources spring the strongest arguments which render faith most
credible to natural reason and such as cannot fail to make {23}
every well-balanced mind which has not been perverted by vice or
passion embrace it and love it. May this protest of mine, which I
have deliberately drawn up and which I leave to posterity,
subscribed with my own hand and which shows to all and every one
that I do not blush at the Gospel--may it, as I have said, produce
some good fruit.
"Signed at Milan, January 6, 1815, Alessandro Volta."
Silvio Pellico, whose volume, "My Ten Years' Imprisonment", is one of
the precious little books of literature that seem destined to enduring
interest, had doubted in the midst of his trials and hardships the
presence of Providence in the world and the existence of a hereafter.
In the midst of his doubts he turned to Volta.
"In thy old age, O Volta!" said Pellico, "the hand of Providence
placed in thy pathway a young man gone astray. 'Oh! thou,' said I to
the ancient seer, 'who hast plunged deeper than others into the
secrets of the Creator, teach me the road that will lead me to the
light.' And the old man made answer: 'I too have doubted, but I have
sought. The great scandal of my youth was to behold the teachers of
those days lay hold of science to combat religion. For me to-day I see
only God everywhere.'"
In spite of traditions to the contrary great physicians in their
relation to faith are like the great discoverers in electricity. As a
rule the greater they are as original workers in the medical sciences
the more emphatic their expressions of their belief in religion and
its efficacy in the relief of human ills. The opinions of a few of our
greatest physicians in the modern era of medicine are quoted here as
examples of their attitude of mind.
Sir Richard Owen, probably the greatest anatomist of {24} the
nineteenth century, was a convinced Christian and saw nothing in
scientific truth inimical to the Christian faith. In an address before
the Young Men's Christian Association, he asked his "fellow
Christians":
"Has aught that is essentially Christian suffered--have its truths
ceased to spread and operate in mankind--since physical doctrines,
supposed or 'declared contrary to Holy Writ', have been established?
"Allay, then, your fears, and trust in the Author of all truth, who
has decreed that it shall never perish; who has given a power to man
to acquire that most precious of his possessions with an
intellectual nature that will ultimately rest upon due demonstrative
evidence."
Sir James Paget, sometime president of the Royal College of Surgeons
of England and vice-chancellor of London University, looked upon as
one of the most distinguished of medical scientists in his time, after
whom a special disease described by him has been named, in answer to
the question as to the attitude of scientists toward religion said:
"You will find among scientific men very few who attack either
theology or religion. The attacks imputed to them are made, for the
most part, by those who, with a very scanty knowledge of science, use,
not its facts, but its most distant inferences, as they do whatever
else they can get from any source, for the overthrow of religious
beliefs."
Sir Samuel Wilks, another of the presidents of the Royal College of
Physicians and distinguished in many other ways among the physicians
of Great Britain, in his Harveian Oration expressed himself very
definitely in this matter of the relations of science and religion,
and his quotation from our own Oliver Wendell Holmes adds to the
interest of what he has to say.
{25}
"Hear what a learned professor of anatomy, Wendell Holmes, can say:
'Science represents the thought of God discovered by man; by
learning the natural laws he attaches effects to their first cause,
the will of the Creator', or in the poetic language of Goethe:
'Nature is the living garment of God.'
"Science conducts us through infinite paths; it is a fruitful
pursuit for the most poetic imagination. We take the world as we
find it and endeavor to unravel its mysteries; but the Alpha and
Omega we know not. Enough for us to look at what is lying around us;
it is a part we see and not the whole, but we can say with the poet,
'We doubt not, through the ages one increasing purpose runs.'"
Professor Sims Woodhead, well known as one of the distinguished
contributors to pathology in the nineteenth century and who was,
before being professor of pathology at Cambridge the director of the
Laboratories of the Conjoint Board of the Royal College of Physicians
(London) and Surgeons (England) may very well be taken as a
representative of the medical scientists of the last generation of the
nineteenth century. It has been said that where there are three
physicians there are two atheists, and perhaps this may be true among
the smaller fry of the profession, but it certainly is not among the
most distinguished members of it. Such men as Pasteur, Lord Lister,
Robert Graves, Corrigan, Laennec, Claude Bernard, Johannes Mueller, are
the outspoken contradiction of it. Pathology and anatomy, in both of
which subjects Professor Woodhead was a teacher, are often said to be
rather serious in their inroads on the faith of the men who pursue
them closely. Professor Woodhead is on record categorically with
regard to this subject of {26} the relations of the Bible and
religion, and science and religion, and his words are well worth while
quoting here.
"As regards the statement that 'recent scientific research has shown
the Bible and Religion to be untrue', nothing is further from the
real fact; the more the Bible is tested the more it is found to be
made up of historical documents. Moreover, it is recognized that the
Bible, as a record of truths, never falls foul of Science in its
search after truth, and scientific men are too true to themselves to
take the stand that they will not accept truth of any kind.
"I agree with you that certain theories put forward in the name of
Science may be opposed to certain theological dogmas; but men are
certainly coming to see that between the facts of Science and the
essential teachings of the Christian religion there is never any
real opposition; and by the 'Christian Religion' I mean the religion
of Christ, not what some people have wished to read into it; and by
'science' I mean a search for truth and knowledge, and by 'men of
science' I mean men engaged in that search."
Professor John W. Taylor, one of the distinguished physicians of Great
Britain and president of the British Gynecological Society, summed up
the answer to the question "Can We Still Believe?" in words that show
how devout a great medical scientist can be:
"What can we 'hold by' as Christians? We can hold by the Faith of the
early Apostles as enunciated in the Apostles' and the Nicene Creeds,
and plainly foreshadowed in 1 Cor. xv. This was written within thirty
years of our Lord's crucifixion and must have been 'received' by St.
Paul immediately on his conversion." Any one who will turn to that
chapter of First Corinthians will {27} find that it contains all the
essentials of Christian faith, yet here is a great modern physician
finding in it the expression of his own mental attitude toward
religion in our time.
Biologists, in spite of popular impressions to the contrary, have
paralleled physicians in this regard. To cite but one or two:
Professor George Romanes, who was considered not alone one of the
leaders of scientific thought in England, but one of the foremost
naturalists of modern times, after expressions as a younger man that
showed his deep and even devout belief in religion, wrote somewhat
later a defense of atheism on scientific grounds. Some years
afterwards, in the maturity of his powers, he prepared a
thorough-going recantation of this in the shape of a work designed to
show the fallacy of his former atheistic views, in which he said:
"It is a general, if not a universal rule that those who reject
Christianity with contempt are those who care not for religion of
any kind. 'Depart from me' has always been the sentiment of such. On
the other hand, those in whom the religious sentiment is intact, but
who have rejected Christianity on intellectual grounds, still almost
deify Christ. These facts are remarkable."
"Unbelief," Professor Romanes concluded, "is usually due to
indolence, often to prejudice, and never a thing to be proud of."
In every department of science one finds the representatives of the
various branches of scientific study in harmony on this subject of
religion and science. Professor George Boulger, whose work has been
mainly done in botany and who was a fellow of a number of the
scientific societies of England and vice-president of the Selborne
{28} Society, has some very direct expressions in the matter that add
to the significance of what has been said by others.
"In philosophy, in physics, and in astronomy I am content to place
myself on the side of Bacon, of Newton, of Napoleon. I believe, with
Bacon, that 'a little Philosophy inclineth Man's Minde to Atheisme;
but depth in Philosophy bringeth Men's Mindes about to Religion.'
With Newton I am content to 'seem to have been only like a boy
playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then
finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst
the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.' With
Napoleon--not a man of science but a man of the world, a man of
action--I would say to our neo-Epicureans as he did to his sceptical
officers, pointing to the stars, 'Gentlemen, you may talk all night,
but who made all these?'"
He recognized how many difficulties there might be for the scientist,
but felt, as Cardinal Newman once said, that hundreds of difficulties
may not make a single doubt. Professor Boulger has dealt with some of
these cruder difficulties with trenchant directness.
"I am perfectly aware of the temptation of the physiological
laboratory, when one is face to face with the facts of the
localisation of brain-functions and the influence of purely physical
conditions upon mentality, until one is almost led to Buchner's
gross misstatement that 'the brain secretes thought as the liver
secretes bile'; but here, as ever, it is at the very base of the
problem that the unsolved mystery shows itself insoluble. Force,
Matter, Life, Thought, Will,--what are they, whence come they?
Science deals with their phenomena, their manifestations. With John
Ray I would term the study of nature a pious duty, one suited to a
Sabbath day and not {29} improbably one of the main occupations of
the endless Sabbaths hereafter.... But true science will never
presume to say that it can deal with anything beyond these
phenomena. As I am as convinced that the Christian Faith is a Divine
revelation as I am that 'Nature' is the creation of the Divine First
Cause, it is, of course, to me unthinkable that there could be any
conflict between them."
Not only the scientists themselves but the philosophic students of the
whole range of modern thought who took the information imparted by the
specialists and coordinated it for the purpose of finding the
philosophic conclusions to be drawn from it all as to man's life and
destiny and the meaning of it all have recognized the place of
religion in Life and its significance for humanity.
Mr. Frederic Harrison, the well-known English apostle of Comte, whose
Positivism might possibly have been expected to lead him away from
such ideas, did not hesitate in the midst of that wave of skepticism
which spread over Europe shortly after the "silly seventies" when so
many even of the well-informed thought that natural selection was
going to explain everything for us and solve all the mysteries, to
utter some very strong words on the subject that well deserve to be
recalled. In his book, "The Creed of a Layman," he said, for
instance:
"I believe that before all things, needful beyond all else, is true
religion. This only can give wisdom, happiness and goodness to men
and a nobler life to mankind. Nothing but this can sustain, guide
and satisfy all lives, control all characters and unite all men.
True religion must rule in every heart, brain and will, over every
people of the whole earth; inspire every thought, hallow every
emotion and be the guide of every act."
{30}
And by what he termed the true religion Mr. Harrison did not mean
merely some vague deism or some shadowy belief in a vaguer power that
made for righteousness, but a very definite personal relationship to a
personal God who was not only to be looked up to and reverenced but
who was to be loved.
"The paramount importance to Man of Religion--at once dominant over
brain and heart--a living reality and working power--the necessity
for this has not only never left me at any time but year by year has
grown deeper as a conviction and more familiar as a rule of life.
But as the indispensable need of true religion grew stronger in my
mind, I more and more came to feel that religion would end in vague
sentimentality unless it has an object of devotion distinctly
grasped by the intellect and able to kindle ardent emotions. The
nature--if not the name--of the Supreme Being is in truth decisive.
Unless the Supreme Power be felt to be in sympathy with the
believer, be akin to the believer, be in active touch with his life
and heart, such a religion is merely a dogma; it cannot be a guide
of life in the spring of action--the object of love."
Agnosticism, so fashionable in educational circles at the end of the
nineteenth century, has practically disappeared, or at least has
suffered such an eclipse that its adherents are comparatively few.
There was a time in the generation that is still alive when a great
many educators who felt that they were the leaders of thought in our
time were quite sure that agnosticism would be the only mode of
intellectual reaction which the educated man could possibly think of
allowing to take place in him by the time the year of grace 1920 had
come. Instead agnosticism, like so many other movements of similar
{31} kind founded on human thinking, in accord with the fashion of the
moment, has dwindled into insignificance. Fortunately there were some
educators who even twenty-five years ago recognized the real portent
of it and stated their opinions so emphatically as to keep the
educational world of their time from being entirely run away with.
President Schurman of Cornell said:
"Agnosticism is the apotheosis of skepticism. It is skepticism as a
creed, as a system, as an ultimate resting-place. Those who proclaim
it strangely misread the processes and the conditions of our
spiritual life. _They make the aimless gropings of the youthful
intellect an ideal for the thinking of mature men_. Only, instead of
the awful earnestness of the inquiring youth, they often affect an
indifference to the great problems which oppress him. As though we
could be indifferent to the highest interests of the human spirit!
So long as life lasts, so long must we strive to grasp the ultimate
truth of things. To shut our eyes to problems is an ostrich policy.
Man is called by an inner voice to strive, and strive, and strive,
and not to yield. Agnosticism would eradicate this noble endeavor.
Its only justification, so far as I can see, is that men never
attain the absolute truth, but only make successive approximations
to it."
Such men seem to forget the great lesson that the differential
calculus has taught us. It represents one of the greatest developments
of modern mathematics. It does not solve problems by absolute
solutions but by such approximations as make the answer which cannot
be reached very clear. It has been of immense value in adding to the
knowledge of mankind and in giving science particularly a command over
principles that would otherwise seem impossible. Religion requires
{32} faith to complete it. Knowledge can never more than approximate
conclusions with regard to many religious questions. Such
approximations, however, like the answers in differential calculus,
represent real advances on the road to knowledge that are of great
value in directing men toward what is best in life.
Mr. Frederic Harrison has answered this question "Can We Still
Believe?" by insisting that belief in the hereafter is the most
precious heritage that man has, to be fostered above all else. He
said:
"The great truth of a life beyond the grave is indeed one of the
best possessions of Man, the fondest of all noble, living and
working doctrines on earth. When Paul first preached it in that
sublime song of triumph over death, which has so often thrilled us
to the marrow as we stood round the coffined dead, he gave the human
race a new and imperishable hope to last while the planet
endures.... Let us cherish and hold fast this glad tiding of good
things."
Any one who faces the question of religion seriously realizes that not
only it is not a thing of the past but that the rationalistic
tendencies of the later nineteenth century have had their usual
inevitable reaction emphasized by the Great War, so that men are
readier to be swayed by religious influences than ever before. The
more one studies the problems of health of mind and of body connected
with religion, and the strong factor that it is for the making of
character, the shaping of destiny and the cultivation of happiness,
the more one realizes the truth of Napoleon's expression that if
religion were to disappear we should have to reinvent it, because of
the immense benefit that it represents for mankind.
{33}
CHAPTER II
PRAYER
In spite of a very prevalent impression in the matter, the
all-important element of religion is not attendance at church or the
public exercise of religious functions, or even the joining in
religious celebrations, for all these may be accomplished by routine
without an element of real devotion to the Creator in them. They may
even be gone through with hypocritically while all the time one is
thinking of merely worldly things, or even of the effect that one is
producing on others by the show of devotion, though with such slight
advertence as to make the devotions of extremely little value or even
a sort of insult to the Almighty if the negligent attitude of mind is
assumed deliberately. Bodily participation in worship is a necessary
adjunct of the expression of religious feeling, but it is of course of
just so much less importance than the mental worship of the Creator as
the body is less important than the mind. Mental adoration of the
Deity is accomplished through prayer, which is the all-important
personal element of religion.
Prayer in the words of the old Christian teachers is "A raising up of
the mind to God asking for help, begging for forgiveness for past
errors and thanking Him for all that He has done for us." Real prayer
is no mere formula of words, and some very fervent prayers are made
without being formulated into words at all. I remember {34} once
suggesting in a medical meeting that prayer was an extremely valuable
adjunct to the treatment for certain milder forms of disturbed
mentality and for the dreads and obsessions that haunt men and women,
that is, in general for that very important class of diseases which in
our day are grouped under the term psychoneuroses. A physician friend,
in discussing the suggestion, said that no words that he knew would
dispel or be of the slightest help in any of these conditions as they
came under his observation. Prayer is not, however, a formula of
words, but an act of the mind and the heart and the will, for to be
genuine, it should contain acknowledgment, affection and resolve. My
colleague's failure to appreciate the true meaning of prayer and his
apparent persuasion that the words were the all-important element in
prayer are not surprising, for rather frequently it happens that the
personal experience of the professional classes as to prayer is not
calculated to be really enlightening.
Professor James confesses that unfortunately comparatively few
educated people have the real power of prayer; those who have,
however, possess a magnificent source of renewed energy that can be of
the greatest possible service to them. He says:
"Relatively few medical men and scientific men, I fancy, can pray.
Few can carry on any living commerce with 'God.' Yet many of us are
well aware of how much freer and abler our lives would be, were such
important forms of energizing not sealed up by the critical
atmosphere in which we have been reared. There are in every one
potential forms of activity that actually are shunted out from use.
Part of the imperfect vitality under which we labor can thus be
easily explained. One part of our mind dams up--even _damns_
up!--the other parts."
{35}
Manifestly the well-known professor of psychology envied those who
lived lives of prayer and felt that he was missing something in life
from not possessing the developed faculty to enjoy their privileges.
Like so many other of the good things of life, prayer, to be really
efficient for all the good it can produce, must be a habit and must be
practiced as a rule from very early years. Otherwise it is hard to
make it such a factor in living as is significant for the best, and
professional men commonly have not given enough time to the practice
in their earlier years to make it of potency when it may be needed.
It is of course not long vocal prayers--though many people find not
only consolation, but strength for their work and the added capacity
to bear their trials in these--but the frequent raising up of the
heart and mind to the Power above us, striving to put our intentions
in line with His in the hope to do our work so that it will not be
unworthy of the best aspirations that He has put in our hearts, that
counts. Many of the saints have suggested that all our work should be
a prayer begun with the right intention, pursued, no matter how
difficult it may be, with the feeling that this is what we ought to do
here and now, and finished with the offering of it to the Creator who
has lent us the energy to accomplish it. _Ora et Labora_, pray and
work, was the motto which Benedict, who revolutionized the social
conditions of Europe by bringing back the dignity of labor and lifting
men's minds out of the rut of the cult of their bodies, into which
they had fallen at the close of the Roman Empire, gave to the members
of his order. It was really not two things but one that he meant. What
his sons accomplished as the result of his great motto we are only
just beginning to recognize. They saved the old {36} classics for us,
kept the torch of education burning when barbarism might have quenched
it, passed it on to the new generation, yet at the same time saved and
developed agriculture so that, as President Goodell of the
Massachusetts Agricultural College said, they made some of the best
agricultural schools, in the best sense of that term, that have ever
been made, and organized health and happiness for the country people
as they have never been made possible before or since, except in the
very modern time.
In the chapter on longevity there are some statistics which might very
well and easily have been increased in numbers with regard to the
effect of St. Benedict's foundation on the length of life that men
have lived. Even now, in the midst of all our improvement in
sanitation which has so lowered the death rate among mankind, we find
that nearly fifteen hundred years after Benedict's work was first
begun, his direction to make life a compend of work and prayer is
having its effect in prolonging existence for the followers of his
rule to-day. He himself would probably have said that it was the
combination of these two that proved so effective in this important
matter of lengthening life. We find that people outside the
monasteries work enough, however, but fail to pray, so it would seem
that prayer is a particularly important factor for monastic longevity,
at least. Length of life comes, however, from a healthy mind in a
healthy body, and nothing so conduces to the possession of a healthy
mind as the habit of prayer, since it enables man to throw off to some
extent at least--and the deeper the prayer habit the more it will do
it--the solicitudes and anxieties with regard to the past and the
present and the future which disturb so many people. As Ignatius
Loyola, the {37} wise founder of the Jesuits, said: "Pray as if
everything depended on God; work as if everything depended on you; but
leave everything to the Almighty, for you might as well since His Will
will surely be accomplished anyhow."
It would be very easy to think that such habits of prayer in the midst
of work would only be possible if the work that one was engaged at was
not very interesting or was not taken very seriously and was being
accomplished in more or less of a routine. In particular many
scientific students, and especially those who are interested in
psychology, would probably feel quite sure that very great results
could not be accomplished in any important work if distractions of
this kind were allowed and above all encouraged.
It is interesting then to take some of the examples of men who are
known to have formed and maintained such habits and yet accomplished
very great work for mankind. The list might be made a very long one;
we shall mention only a few of the most distinguished. Almost in our
own time Pasteur said, as we have already quoted: "The more I study
nature the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator. I pray
while I am engaged at work in the laboratory." A distinguished
contemporary of his in France in his earlier years was Leverrier.
There is no doubt at all about his power of concentration; he is the
scientist who discovered the planet Neptune by mathematics alone
without the aid of a telescope. He constantly kept a crucifix in his
observatory and used to turn his eyes to it frequently for
recollection and then go on with his calculations. There is a
well-known picture of Vesalius, who so well deserves the title of
Father of Modern Anatomy, at work in his {38} anatomical rooms with a
crucifix before him. The composition is founded on the tradition that
the great anatomist was a devout man who prayed as he worked. He made
a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in his older years in expiation for a
fault committed.
In spite of traditions to the contrary, a great many of our scientists
of the last two centuries whose work has meant most for modern
medicine have been men to whom prayer meant very much. There are
traditions of Morgagni, the distinguished father of modern pathology,
as Virchow hailed him, which show that never a day passed without his
raising his heart in prayer. Volta and Galvani, whose names have
become so familiar in modern electricity, were both of them well known
for their devotion to the practice of daily religious duties. French
scientists were not less devout. Laennec, a Breton by birth, lost none
of the devoutness of his early years so characteristic of the Bretons
even when he was in the midst of the great work which enabled him to
write the greatest medical book in modern times. Ozanam has told us
that when he himself felt thoroughly discouraged and ready to think
religion something that any one who wanted to keep up with modern
thought would have to give up, he wandered into a church, hoping that
prayer might help him to dispel his doubts and difficulties and found
there praying before the altar devoutly his great professor of
science, Ampere.
Deep thinkers, whether of scientific temper of mind or not, have
recognized the value of prayer. Vesalius' great contemporary,
Michelangelo, who is perhaps the greatest intellectual and artistic
genius that the world has ever known--sculptor, architect, painter,
poet, and unsurpassed in all these modes of human expression {39} at
their highest--was another for whom his crucifix meant much and who
frequently turned to it. One of his greatest sonnets is dedicated to
the Crucified One. Of Leonardo da Vinci's private life we we know less, but
on his death bed he left a sum of money to be used to provide candles
to burn before the altar of the little village church at which he had
prayed as a boy, so that evidently something of that old fervor of
spirit was his at the end. Leonardo da Vinci's mind was one of the
most acute in the whole history of mankind. He was a great painter,
sculptor, architect, and also a great engineer, a great scientific
discoverer, an inventor of all sorts of useful appliances and a
veritable marvel of comprehensive appreciation of the significance of
even the most obscure things. He is a founder in half a dozen
sciences, paleontology, biology, anatomy, physics and mechanics, and
nothing makes one feel the smallness of the ordinary man like reading
a sketch of Leonardo's achievements.
Of course the clergymen scientists have been men of prayer, but few
people realize how many of them have made distinguished contributions
to the domain of science. Poggendorf's "Biographical Lexicon" contains
the names of nearly a thousand clergymen who have made such
contributions to science as deserve that their fame should be thus
enshrined among the scientists of history. One of the greatest
astronomers of the nineteenth century was Father Secchi, a Jesuit,
some of whose work was done for a time in America. Among the most
distinguished names in modern science are Abbe Breuil and Father
Obermaier, who have taught the world so much about the cave man. Both
of them are well known for their faithful performance of their
religious duties in the midst of their scientific work.
{40}
Raising up the heart and mind in the midst of work, instead of
increasing distractions, rather helps to control them. Distractions
will come and may prove seriously wasteful of time, but are caught in
the habit of lifting up the mind occasionally, and then the original
work is taken up with renewed energy. Above all, such a habit of
prayer keeps people from getting into a state of irritable haste about
their work in which they consume a lot of energy without getting much
done and wear out their nervous systems by the feeling of nervousness
that comes over them. To do anything under a sense of pressure is
nearly always to disturb the best efforts of the mind and skimp the
work. Doing things in this way leads to that bane of modern existence,
nervous breakdown, which has become ever so much commoner since men
forgot that it is not labor for ourselves that counts so much as labor
for others, and that an over-anxiety to get things done for selfish
reasons burns up nervous energy faster than anything else. Fussy,
irritable effort to work gets on the nerves sooner than any amount of
calm effort would. Prayer as I have described would be the cure for
it. St. Theresa's well-known prayer is the antidote. [Footnote 3]
[Footnote 3:
Let nothing disturb thee,
Let nothing affright thee,
All things are passing,
God never changeth.
Who God possesseth
In nothing is wanting.
Alone God sufficeth.
(Longfellow translation.) ]
When the life of the late Cardinal Vaughan of London appeared, one of
the most surprising things in it was the story of the distinguished
English Cardinal's habit of prayer. Almost needless to say he was an
extremely busy man. Important problems in the administration {41} of
his immense archdiocese and in the relationship of the English
Catholics to their fellow citizens came before him every day. He had
to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and make his decisions
promptly and thoroughly, for a great many details necessarily devolved
on him. Somehow he found time for hours of prayer during the day, and
those who knew him best felt sure he would have declared that so far
from distracting him in his work or taking time from it in any real
sense of the word, it would have been quite impossible for him to
accomplish all he did without this habit of prayer. It was this which
enabled him to keep a placid mind and make his decisions easily and
firmly in the midst of his work. He himself would undoubtedly have
added that he felt he actually derived help from the Infinite through
prayer, which enabled him to do his work ever so much better than
would have been possible by his own unaided effort. There have been
many others, and not a few of them who were not churchmen, who have
felt this same way even in our strenuous times.
A whole series of the generals in command of important departments of
the French army were men who never let a day pass without prayer and
who often raised their hearts and minds up to the Power above them for
help in their work and also for resignation that the will of the Most
High might be accomplished. General Pau, for instance, was one of
these. When, during the war, he was presented with flowers by the
children of villages through which he passed, he would say, "These
must be for the altar," and then he would ask the children to pray for
the success of the French army and would insist that for victory "we
must pray very much." General de Castelnau was another of these men
who {42} found a resource and a real help in prayer. He felt that the
prayers of others helped him. That is the index of real recognition of
the value of prayer. "I beg you to implore Him especially to give me
light and courage; there is no position where one is more completely
in His hands than that which I hold." He wrote to Monsignor Ricard,
Archbishop of Auch, "More than ever I find by experience the
all-importance in war, as elsewhere, of the 'imponderables' and these
'imponderables' are manifestly in His hands Who knows all and guides
all."
We might go on with such examples. For instance, Marshal Petain, who
at the end of the war was in command of the French troops, was another
of these strong men of prayer. Earlier in the Great War he had been in
command at Verdun, transferred there just as it seemed almost
impossible to believe that the Germans could be kept from taking the
place. The words of his first order issued the day of his
arrival--"They shall not pass"--show the character of the man. He was
almost reckless in his bravery when it was necessary to impress his
troops with the need to go on, no matter what it cost. Alone and on
foot he led his troops under a rain of German shells at Saint Bon;
after that he could ask anything of his men. General Gouraud, whose
masterly defense of the Allied line when the Germans made their great
final unsuccessful attack stamps him as one of the greatest military
leaders of the day, had been wounded a number of times before this,
but refused to give up, and when, early in the war, one of his arms
had to be amputated and the surgeons were afraid that he would object,
he said very simply, "Go on, if you think it necessary; I offer it to
God for France." His recovery from his several wounds at that time
seemed almost impossible, so in gratitude for it he {43} hung an
_ex-voto_ in white marble at the shrine of Our Lady of Victories in
Paris. General Fayolle is another striking example of prayerfulness in
a practical man. He had intended to spend a year of his retirement,
which came just before the war opened, in following the footsteps of
St. Paul's missionary voyages. He offered himself for service and
proved a great leader, yet a simple, kindly man whom his soldiers
called Pere Fayolle. A letter of his directed to the Mayor of Mainz
showed very clearly that while he remembered and realized all the
cruelty of the German occupation of Belgium and France, there was no
fear of reprisals from the French, just though they might be. He is a
man of deep knowledge of his religion as well as of firm piety, and he
is famous for his matter-of-fact common sense. He has all the
qualities which some people, because they have had so little
experience in the matter, assume are not to be found in a man who
believes thoroughly in and practices prayer.
A good deal has been said in recent years about the practice of "going
into the silence" and finding there renewal of self. Like so many
other new modes of expression, this is merely a new formula for that
very old religious custom, meditation, and some of the old writers on
spiritual subjects, not only generations ago but actually many
hundreds of years before modern history began, laid down the rules for
it rather carefully. Meditation can be a source of some of the most
valuable suggestive, helpful consolation as well as profound
enlightenment in difficult problems that human nature has. Above all
it generates a calm that makes for peace of mind and, therefore,
health of body. John Boyle O'Reilly recognized its deeper meanings a
generation ago when he wrote:
{44}
"The infinite always is silent:
It is only the finite that speaks.
Our words are the idle wave-caps
On the deep that never breaks.
We may question with wand of science,
Explain, decide, and discuss;
But only in meditation
The Mystery speaks to us."
Most of the religious orders, and it is in them particularly that the
effect of religion on health and happiness and efficiency and increase
of the power to achieve, under the influence of profoundly religious
motives, can be studied, require by rule that their members shall
spend at least half an hour in meditation each morning; and with many
of them, of course, an hour or more is required. They prepare for it
the night before by reading some passage in the life of Christ, or by
taking some special lesson from His teaching; the next morning they
reflect how this can be exemplified in their own daily lives and
proceed to make certain practical applications of it to the everyday
concerns with which they are occupied.
It is surprising how efficient in living up to their very best during
the day this makes a great many of the members. There are exceptions,
of course, who fail to derive the proper benefit from the practice
because they do not devote themselves to it with sufficient
earnestness to secure its advantages, but most of them, as the result
of this daily period of morning prayer, are rendered capable of going
through a monotonous round of hard daily work and succeed in getting
excellent results and in keeping cheerful and light-hearted in the
midst of what might otherwise seem a very trivial mode of life. The
motives thus imparted to them often make even the trifles of life of
great interest and significant import.
{45}
As a result of their life of prayer, members of religious orders have
ever so many less complaints than people who live under corresponding
circumstances, largely within doors amid a rather monotonous round of
existence. It is extremely rare to find religious devotees who "enjoy
poor health" as so many of the laity do. Having less complaints they
suffer less from disease, for after all discomfort depends on two
factors,--one the irritation and the other the mode of its reception.
An irritable person will suffer tortures, though under the same
circumstances a placid, composed person will be but very little
disturbed. Whenever there is much reaction, there is always an
increase of the pain that has to be borne. Whenever much attention is
paid to discomfort, the concentration of mind on it multiplies by the
law of avalanche the number of cells in the brain affected, and this
multiplies the actual discomfort felt. A few thousand cells may be
affected by a particular focus of irritation, but if all the other
cells of the brain are concentrated on this sensation, each of them,
and there are many millions of them, will share something at least of
the discomfort. Besides, concentration of attention sends more blood
or rather opens the blood vessels in the irritated neighborhood
somewhat in the way that a blush opens them up on the cheeks, and this
hyperemia increases the sensitiveness of the part. The individual,
then, who by the help of prayer lessens his complaints actually
lessens his discomfort. To stand a thing patiently for a high motive
actually makes the pain suffered less than it otherwise would be.
When a man can look calmly forward to the future and say
wholeheartedly, "Thy Will be done on earth as it is in heaven," a
great many things are easier to bear {46} because of the recognition
of the fact that they are the will of a Providence who oversees
everything that is being accomplished, and that somehow, somewhere,
all is to be for the best. When men recall to themselves the words,
"Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors," or "Forgive us our
trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us," word it as
you will, they are reminded of how much they owe to the Father in
heaven, and, therefore, how much they ought to be willing to pay back,
not only for what they have been given but also for all the failures
that they have made, to say nothing of serious faults. Suffering then
comes to have a real meaning that any one, even the least
intellectual, can understand, and by that very fact it becomes easier
to bear. I have often found that I could do a great deal for nervous
patients by suggesting that they adopt some morning practice of
prayer. Usually the best thing for my Catholic patients was to advise
them to go to Mass. For this they had to get up at a definite hour,
dress promptly, and usually be some blocks away from home by eight
o'clock. Some such duty as this, requiring promptitude and taking the
mind off oneself and the little troubles that often loom so large in
the morning, is an excellent thing for neurotic patients. The great
characteristic of the neuroses is that they make people feel depressed
when they first awake. They often feel tired and incapable and find it
hard to begin the day well; and beginning the day well often means
more than anything else in dispelling nervous symptoms and dreads and
inhibitions. Most nervous people realize that when they have to get up
promptly at about seven o'clock, as for instance after a night on a
train, they have almost none of the feelings of oppression that greet
their arising {47} when they can turn over in bed and drowse a little
longer and let the troubles which have awakened ever so much more
promptly than their incentives to do things soak in and take
possession of them. To get up and accomplish a duty that gives some
satisfaction soon proves to be a wide-open gate of escape from these
early morning "blue devils" of which so many of the nervous complain
so bitterly.
The differential diagnosis between merely nervous symptoms and the
feelings of tiredness and incapacity which come from organic disease
can often be made from the early morning symptoms. Nervous patients
feel their worst in the very early morning. They often wonder how they
will be able to get through the day without breaking down. After an
hour or two they begin to feel somewhat better, though life still
looks blue enough. On towards ten o'clock they think that the sun may
shine for them again. By noon, especially if they have done something
in the meantime, they feel much better, and after their lunch in the
early afternoon they begin to be quite chipper; toward evening they
usually are persuaded that after all life may be worth living, and by
the time they are ready to go to bed--and unfortunately they are
tempted to put off going to bed until rather late because they do feel
so well--they are inclined to wonder how it is possible that they felt
so depressed in the morning. The sufferer from organic disease,
however, always feels best in the early morning and begins to get
tired toward noon; the evening is his time of least enjoyment, and he
is quite ready to get to bed rather early. For the neurotic patient
waking to a sense of his troubles at once, nothing is better than a
prompt lifting up of his mind to God to offer Him the new {48} day
that He has given, no matter how it may turn out, and a readiness to
take things as they come so that His will may be fulfilled.
In nervous patients one would almost have the feeling that their wills
did not wake up nearly so soon as their memories, or even quite so
soon as their intellects, such as they have. Their wills need to be
aroused. For men setting-up exercises of various kinds are
particularly valuable because the will has got to be used in doing
them; many a young soldier who during the war was waked up at the
unearthly hour of five o'clock and had perforce to get out of bed,
found himself full of pains and aches not only of body, but of mind,
and wondered how he could stand it. After ten minutes of setting-up
exercises, with the blood coursing through his muscles and deep
breaths of outdoor air to oxygenate sluggish tissues, he felt like
another man. The days seemed nothing to endure then. For a good many
nervous women the exercise of getting to church after prompt rising
and dressing and then the occupation of mind with deep, serious
thoughts of prayer, will do very much what the setting-up exercises
did for the young soldiers during the war. I have tried this so often
on patients that I know whereof I speak, and I can think of nothing
that does them more good than to have some such enlivening incident
that satisfies their hearts and minds and starts them at once doing
something that will help them throw off the fear thoughts so prone to
crowd in.
It is surprising often to learn what things are accomplished by people
who find an unfailing resource for their powers physical and mental in
prayer. I had the privilege of knowing a frail little woman whose life
seemed to be one long prayer, so entirely was every {49} action guided
by what she felt God would like her to do at any particular time; and
during very nearly sixty years she directed the destinies of a
community of women who did more for the charities and education of an
important State than any other single factor that I know. She
organized hospitals, multiplied schools, built homes for the care of
orphans, established an academy with excellent standards in the days
when educational criteria were low, and put a climax to her work by
building a college for women in which hundreds of young women are now
being educated in the best sense of that word,--that is, not only
having their minds stuffed with knowledge, but having their thinking
powers aroused and, in Huxley's expressive phrase, having their
"passions trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a
tender conscience." I am sure that Huxley's further words might be
used of the graduates,--that they have "learned to love all beauty,
whether of nature or of art, to hate all vileness and respect others
as themselves." The little woman who did all this, frail little thing
she often seemed, would have said, I feel certain, that she derived
the energy to do it all from prayer.
Some years ago I wrote a sketch of another one of these women of
prayer, a little Italian noblewoman who, touched by the condition of
the poor Italians in America--only by America she meant both
Americas--came over here to help them. She organized Columbus
hospitals in New York, Chicago, Seattle and Denver. She established
literally hundreds of schools. She gathered around her a band of
several thousand young women who devoted themselves to the
accomplishment of anything and everything that would help the Italians
in this country. They were not all Italians themselves, but they were
won to {50} the work by the ardent enthusiasm and the marvelously
charming personality of this little woman. The United States would
seem to be field large enough for her zeal or for that of any one, but
she did not think so, so she went down to South America and organized
to similar good purpose down there, having herself carried on one
occasion across the Cordilleras in a hamper on mule-back. It seemed
almost impossible that any one could have all the energy that she had
and the initiative, and yet with it charming tact, winning ways and
the prudence that enabled her to find her path in some of the most
difficult circumstances. She said over and over again that she owed
her power to prayer. Many times when she was told that she must rest,
she just prayed and went on.
Sometimes the stories of these old-fashioned, prayerful women of our
time will be told properly. They hid themselves from publicity as
sedulously as most people seek it. I think it one of the most precious
privileges of life to have known a score of such women, East and West.
Some of them actually seemed to achieve the impossible and even
ventured to get up from sick beds to do what they felt they must do,
yet they pushed through successfully. Not infrequently they had to
stand all sorts of hardships. Over and over again I have heard the
story of pioneer work in the midst of privations that would surely
seem must break down health; yet many of these women lived to be well
beyond seventy and sometimes even beyond eighty years of age. They
were strengthened, consoled, held up in trial by prayer, and it
enabled them to tap layers of energy in their physical beings which
they themselves scarcely knew they possessed and concerning which
other people were {51} so dubious that they felt sure the workers
would die young of exhausted vitality. Many wondered why some of them
did not suffer from nervous prostration. Men and women of prayer
seldom suffer from nervous prostration in the ordinary sense of the
word, and what is called that in them is very often the manifestation
of some organic ailment which has not been recognized.
As to the power of prayer to enable people to stand suffering and
pain, that is discussed in the chapters on these special subjects.
Raising the mind and heart to God will do more to make even the
extremity of pain bearable than anything else in the world. I have
known a man under an engine, almost literally cooking to death from
the steam that was escaping near him, in poignant agony, take on a
quiet, peaceful look after a priest had crawled under the engine to
give him the last rites of the Church; and though his groans would
still escape from him involuntarily, it was mainly words of prayer
that came and he was evidently in a very different state of mind from
that which governed him but a few moments before when only the
physical side of his case was occupying his mind. Many a soldier
during the war found that when a dread came over him, and he feared
that his courage might leave him, especially when men were falling
thick and fast all around, a little prayer would lift him up and give
him new courage; and when he was so tired that it seemed as though he
could not go on any farther it would enable him to tap a new level of
energy and get his second wind, as it were, and "carry on."
There are a great many people nowadays, and unfortunately they are
ever so much more frequent among the educated classes than among those
who have not had the benefit of an education, who seem to think that
prayer {52} is a confession of weakness. When a man or a woman has
recourse to prayer they would be inclined to say that it is because he
or she has not the strength of character and personality that enables
them to stand up under the trials of life and to face difficulties
valiantly and hopefully. Impressions like this have been rather
fostered among the modern intellectual classes who, it must be
recalled, are not always intelligent.
We saw in the first chapter that while there is a very prevalent
impression that somehow science is opposed to religion and that
scientists find it utterly impossible to accept religious beliefs
seriously and indeed can only pity those who continue to cherish such
outworn superstitions, practically all the greatest scientists of
modern times have been deep believers.
What is true with regard to scientists and belief in religion is true
also with regard to the strongest characters of the world and prayer.
The greatest moral force of the war, the man who stood as Horace long
ago said the perfect man, _totus teres atque rotundus_, should stand,
unmoved, even though the world is falling in pieces around him, was
Cardinal Mercier. When they asked him at the luncheon given to him in
New York by some two thousand of our most prominent commercial
representatives how he, a bishop, "brought up in the peace and quiet
of a university, should stand unmoved in the presence of the greatest
military power on earth and insist on the rights of his country and
his people", his very simple reply was, "As a bishop, there was
nothing else that it occurred to me for the moment to do."
Some of Cardinal Mercier's favorite maxims show how deeply he feels
whence comes his strength. He said, for instance, that "the ideal of
life is a clear sense of {53} duty." His favorite quotation is from
St. Theresa, that well-known expression, "whenever conscience commands
anything, there is only one thing to fear and that is fear." His maxim
for daily life was "The whole duty of man consists in doing God's will
to-day. I care to have no vain regrets with regard to the past and no
idle dreams as to the future, but I shall be quite satisfied if God
gives me His grace to accomplish His Holy Will to-day." It is easy to
see from these that the Cardinal feels his utter dependence on a
Higher Power and the necessity for keeping as closely in touch with
that Higher Power by prayer as possible. There is no doubt at all
about his supreme strength of character and his placid, yet unbending
resolution to accomplish what he sees as duty. There is no doubt,
also, that he feels that he draws his strength to accomplish whatever
he can from prayer. His daily recourse to it, far from being a sign of
weakness in any sense, simply represents the man's own feeling of his
inadequacy to accomplish what his conscience dictates unless he is
strengthened from on High.
Perhaps it is to be expected that a churchman would find his strength
in prayer, but it must not be forgotten that the greatest military
leader of this war, who because of the immense armies that he had to
lead must be considered one of the greatest military geniuses of all
time, confesses also that the source of whatever power he had came
from prayer. Over and over again during the time while he was the
commander-in-chief of the Allied armies. Marshal Foch was discovered
at prayer in some quiet chapel, manifestly absorbed in communion with
God. When congratulated on what he had accomplished, he said at once,
"Do not thank me, but thank the Author of all good to whom the victory
is due." He {54} was often known to ask for prayers and when on the
morning of the first battle of the Marne he met the chaplain of one of
his regiments, he said to him, "Pray for us, father; we advance from
here or die here to-day."
There is a story that comes from his own headquarters that when
sometimes he was thought to be asleep he was found at prayer. When his
first decision as commander-in-chief of the Allied armies had to be
made, and he had to determine whether Amiens should be surrendered to
the enemy and a defense made on lines behind that city, both Haig, in
immediate command of the British forces, as well as Petain, the French
commander, are said to have advised retirement. Foch listened
patiently to their reasons and then asked for twenty minutes by
himself before making his decision, declaring that he would give it in
that time. He spent those minutes walking up and down the garden in
the slight rain that was falling, very much in the concentrated manner
that he was known to assume when praying. At the end of twenty minutes
he declared that Amiens was to be held at all cost,--and it was. This
was the first great step in the breaking of the enemy morale. When
three months later, on the 18th of July--after the Germans had tried
for three days to come through his lines and had practically succeeded
and then, lacking in men and munitions had to stop--Marshal Foch
launched his counter-offensive which represented the beginning of the
end of the war, it was easy to understand the strain through which he
had just passed and the immensity of the responsibility of the
decision that he had to make. After the orders for the
counter-offensive had been sent out he said, "Now I must rest." As can
readily be imagined he had slept {55} but little on any of the three
preceding nights. Half an hour after he retired there came a dispatch
which the high staff decided must be communicated to the
general-in-chief. They hesitated for some time to wake him, but there
was nothing else for it. His adjutant found him on his knees.
The practice of prayer, then, instead of being an index of weakness of
character, is on the contrary a note that is found exemplified in a
great many men who are distinguished for their strength of character.
It is the strong man above all who knows his own weakness and realizes
how incapable he is of doing very great things of himself. It is the
conceited man who is confident that he can accomplish anything that he
wants out of his own strength and often fails. Great generals almost
as a rule have been men who turned aside from the immense calls made
upon them by their military responsibilities to gain consolation and
strength from the Most High. It is surprising often to find how
devoutly they turn to the Higher Power in their trials. Field Marshal
Lord Wolseley carried a copy of Thomas a Kempis' "Imitation of Christ"
with him always and read in it every day. When they found Chinese
Gordon dead at Khartum there was a little copy of Newman's "Dream of
Gerontius" in which he had been reading and making some annotations
during the days before the end. For him, too, the "Imitation of
Christ" was favorite reading, as it was for Stanley the explorer and
many another thoroughly practical, intensely brave and strong man whom
the world has come to appreciate for his strength of character.
In our time there has been noted an extreme lack of delicacy and a
diminution of that reticence which {56} characterized human beings at
their best. There has been a pouring out of the story of their woes
and ills by men and women seeking sympathy which not only does them no
good but which tends to break down their own character. It was
Nietzsche who said, in one of these striking aphorisms of his,
"Sympathy only makes us feel bad and the person for whom we sympathize
feel worse than before." In an older time when there was more faith
and the practice of prayer was commoner, the habit of prayer replaced
this pouring out of the heart to others. People let God know about it
and in that way brought themselves into the mental attitude that
somehow, somewhere, all was well, for God's in His world and all is
right with it. This proved an antidote to that sympathy-seeking
self-pity which is not only so fatal to character development, but
which actually makes the trials and sufferings of life harder to bear
than they would otherwise be and will sometimes lift the little
discomforts that are almost inevitably associated with living up to a
plane of superconsciousness on which they seem to be torments. Prayer
is often its own reward, though any one who practices it in reality
knows that there are other and much higher effects than this
psychological influence which can of itself, however, neutralize many
of the lesser disturbances of life that may be so readily exaggerated.
To many people in our time prayer seems a useless exercise except in
so far as the state of mind which it engenders reacts upon the
individual to console and strengthen him in trials and to hearten him
for difficulties that lie ahead. Even if it had no other effect than
this, prayer would still be a very valuable factor for health in the
midst of the difficulties and above all the {57} dreads of humanity
which are so likely to disturb the proper functioning of organic life.
If this were all that it meant, however, prayer would not be a
religious but a psychotherapeutic exercise. As a matter of belief,
however, prayer is much more than this and, to the mind of the
believer at least, leads to help from on High that may prove of
immense consequence in the development of individual life. Many people
feel that it would be idle to think that prayer can alter the ordinary
course of natural events and that these are rigidly connected with the
causal elements which lead up to them and cannot be modified, once the
chain of causes has been set to work.
It is curiously interesting to realize that not a few of those who
urge this inevitability of causation are just those who refuse to
acknowledge the principle of causation as necessarily leading to the
demonstration that there must be a first cause. As suggested by Sir
Bertram Windle, president of University College, Cork, in his volume
"The Church in Science" which has recently been awarded one of the
Bridgewater prizes in England, it is not difficult to realize "that
the world is by no means so rigidly predetermined as many enthusiastic
votaries of science would have us believe"; he adds:
"There is room for free play; chance has a real objective
significance, viz., the intercrossing of independent causal chains,
and is not a mere cloak for ignorance. Not alone is a large part of
natural occurrences within our own control, but there is opportunity
for God's special direction of events without any contravention of
the laws of science. We cannot see far ahead; for aught we know, a
small change of present plans may result in far-reaching future
consequences. And many present {58} realities were once frail
possibilities hanging on slender causal threads; did not England's
present mineral wealth and insular position originate in some
chance-formed heterogeneity in a nebula? All these life-histories of
countries and individuals stand spread out to God's eternal gaze. At
each stage He sees the possibilities foreclosed or initiated; He
influences development by the primal distribution in the past and by
direction and inspiration in the present."
{59}
CHAPTER III
SACRIFICE
The essence of religion is sacrifice. St. Paul summed it up in his own
inimitable fashion when he said, "I beseech you therefore, brethren,
by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice,
holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service." The
supreme exercise of religious feeling is the readiness to make
sacrifices because one feels that it is the will of the Deity that
they should be made. The "Century Dictionary's" definition of
sacrifice, "the giving up of some prized or desirable thing in behalf
of a higher object", represents the state of mind that one must have
if one is desirous of practicing religion sincerely. The tendency to
make sacrifices seems almost to be ingrained in humanity and to be a
sort of instinct. It is one of these precious manifestations of nature
so difficult to understand and yet representing some great basic
principle of humanity. The feeling of satisfaction that comes with it
represents that compensation for the exercise of a natural function
which so often accompanies natural processes and is sometimes supposed
to be a feature only of the physical yet is so invariably found also
in the moral order.
From the very earliest times men have made sacrifices in the spirit of
religion. Now that the story of the cave man is known not by inference
but by actual discovery {60} of his remains in the caves of western
France and northern Spain, we find that he was an artist who invented
oil colors, grinding the oxides of manganese and of iron in mortars
and mixing them with the rendered fat of animals and painting some of
the most vivid pictures of animals that have ever been made on the
walls of his cave in order to make his home beautiful. Instead of
being just a little better than the beasts, he was an artist, and an
artist is at all times the flower of our civilization, ahead of and
not behind the rest of the race. In the tombs of the cave men finely
made tools have been found buried with the bodies, demonstrating the
belief in a hereafter and the readiness of those who were left behind
to make sacrifices for their dead. For these tools had been produced
at the cost of no little labor, and in the values of the time were
precious. In order that their dead friend might be happy in another
world they were quite willing to make these sacrifices and to devote
other efforts to securing happiness for him. They devoted a good deal
of care to the disposal of the body and even buried red coloring
matter with the remains so that their dead friend might not look too
pale in the next world and perhaps be the subject of remark, because
of that. We rouge our corpses in our time again, but with the idea of
making them presentable for this world.
This state of mind which prompts man to make a sacrifice is, almost
needless to say, extremely valuable for health and for happiness,
because it makes people ready to offer up their feelings in case of
disappointment and even to be ready to accept trials that may come to
them--and life is sure to have them--as representing opportunities for
the making of sacrifices. If one has set one's heart on something and
has devoted great efforts to getting it {61} and then finds that owing
to circumstances it cannot be secured, nothing is so effective as the
deep religious feeling of sacrifice to aid in keeping the
disappointment from affecting health and strength.
We need it at the present time sadly, and its eclipse through
decadence of religion has been a great misfortune. Modern life has
been very much disturbed by the fact that insanity and suicides are
both on the increase to an almost alarming extent and that, sad to
say, the average age at which they occur is steadily becoming earlier.
Suicide happens at ever younger years just in proportion, it would
seem, to the spread of popular education and the lessening of the
influence of religion, while at the same time the necessity for
restraint for insanity and of internments in asylums is also coming at
a younger age. People used to go through with some of the very hard
things of life before they were ready to give up struggling or broke
down in mind, but now some of the minor trials of early life--a petty
setback in school examinations or disappointment in a youthful love
affair--may bring about a very serious breakdown in physical or
mental health and may even lead to suicide.
We need ever so much more training in the discipline of sacrifice even
from very earliest youth, but almost needless to say this can come
practically only from religion, and religious influences are waning
for a great many people. All young folks must be trained to give
things up voluntarily so that when disappointment comes they are ready
for it. They must be taught to stand some of the disagreeable things
in life so that they may have the will power to endure even the
hardest ones, if they should be called upon to do so. Such discipline,
instead of being cruel, is really kind, for constituted as life is and
with {62} hardships and trials inevitable to the great majority of
people, it is all-important that we should be prepared for them. It is
the role of religion particularly to do this. It can accomplish it
without producing unfortunate reactions, but on the contrary with
personal satisfaction to the individual who has to be trained in
endurance because of the feeling that the sacrifices have a worth
beyond that of the merely material.
Whole-hearted sacrifice will lift a character up to heights of heroism
that are supremely admirable and make life exemplary, though the
failure to take the opportunities for sacrifice may lead to crushing
of the spirit entirely. Almost inevitably this brings about
disturbance of health as well as deterioration of character. The loss
of children by death, particularly when there are but one or two
children in a family, as is so frequent in modern times, often brings
on a state of mental perturbation in which the health of mind and
body, especially of women, may suffer severely. Religion, with its
development of the spirit of sacrifice, whenever it is taken
seriously, is the best possible sheet anchor in such cases, and the
gradual diminution of religious feelings and abandonment of religious
practice during the present generation have greatly multiplied the
tendency to such severe breakdowns.
A distinguished scientist. Professor Whittaker, the Royal Astronomer
of Ireland, dwelt on the scientific aspect of sacrifice for high
purpose in a way that is illuminating and serves to make our
generation understand better the enduring nature of sacrifice in
creation and the place that it has in the up-building of what is best
in life.
"Surrender to the will of God generally means the giving up of some
of the delights of the world. Like the {63} coral island built up on
the accumulations of its own past life, the perfected kingdom is to
be reached only by the sacrifice of countless generations of its own
up-builders. But--and this is the greatest of all evidence of the
divine life within humanity--in all ages men have left the pleasures
of their former life to obey the inward call. The long procession
that leads to the distant goal is reunited afresh in every
generation: and to-day millions have found the joy of a life
centered round the words of the Master, 'Repent', 'Follow Me.'"
A distinguished mathematician who is at the same time a very
well-known physical scientist declared not long since that the formula
for happiness may be expressed as follows:
h = g/w
In this, h stands for the amount of individual happiness and is equal
to what the individual has got, g, divided by w, what he wants. If a
man has a great deal but wants ever so much more, his fraction of
happiness may be comparatively small. If he has got even a little but
does not want much more, his fraction of happiness may approach an
integer. If he has got anything in the world and does not want
anything more, according to the terms of the formula, he is infinitely
happy, for one divided by zero equals infinity
(1/0=infinity). What is important for men for their happiness
then is not so much to try to increase the numerator by adding to or
even multiplying their possessions, but to decrease the denominator by
lessening their wants and by decreasing the number of things without
which they feel that they cannot be happy.
{64}
Almost needless to say the one element above all in life which enables
men to reduce their wants and to live in satisfaction with few things
is religion. A great many men in the history of the race have for
religious motives assumed the obligations of voluntary poverty and
have greatly increased satisfaction in life and have found happiness
thereby. The multiplication of material wants which after a time
become needs that actually cannot be dispensed with without a feeling
of serious deprivation leads to such preoccupation with mere bodily
concerns that no time is left to live the life of the spirit and
really to enjoy the things of the mind and the heart and the soul with
the supreme satisfaction which their experience gives to us. The old
pagan poet, Horace, suggested long ago that he hated the apparatus of
luxury because it took away so much of the simple enjoyment of life
and consumed so much time in idle concerns. Nothing is so helpful in
enabling men to simplify life as religious motives. They learn to make
the sacrifice of certain inclinations and feelings that would tempt
them to rival other men and to be satisfied with a little for the sake
of the lessened allurements to luxury that are thus secured for
themselves and their children. Health comes as a by-product of this
simplification of life as it is not likely to come under any other
circumstances.
To all men there comes, sooner or later in life, the realization that
the getting of things cannot bring happiness. Oscar Wilde said in one
of his well-known caustic epigrams, "There are two tragedies in life;
the one is not getting what you want and the other is getting it; and
of the two the latter is the worse." Quite apart from the pessimism
and the exaggeration of the apothegm which constitutes only part of
the humor, there is a great deal of {65} truth in the expression, as
all men learn eventually. What Faust said to Mephistopheles was that
"if ever a time shall come when I shall be willing to say to the
passing moment 'stay you with me, for I shall be satisfied with you
forever' then you may have my soul." All that the devil had to do was
to make him happy, but that is impossible, for "man never is, but to
be blessed." There is no lasting satisfaction in getting, for men
increase their desires with everything they get.
Men come to realize, if they gather wisdom with the years, that the
fruit of striving and the quest after anything in the world, be it
riches or knowledge or honor or power, is of itself but dust and ashes
in the mouth once the goal has been reached, for it is the quest and
not the attainment, the hunt and not the capture that counts in life,
and the only thing that can possibly give any genuine satisfaction to
man is the cultivation of the spirit of sacrifice. Sacrifices made for
a higher power give life a meaning that it would otherwise have lost.
For those who have reached the years beyond middle life, the
blessedness of giving rather than receiving, of making sacrifices
rather than seeking satisfaction, means the renewal of life's hopes
and aspirations.
It is making a virtue of necessity to cultivate the spirit of
sacrifice, but then it was a great philosopher who said that "the only
virtue worth while talking about is the virtue that is made out of
necessity." Most of the things in life that are really worth while we
have to do whether we want to or not, and it is the spirit in which
they are done that lifts them out of the rut of common-place, sordid,
everyday actions into the realm of spiritual significance, because
they are done for a great purpose. Each act of sacrifice may thus be
made an act of worship {66} of the Deity and have almost an infinite
value. This makes even the minor acts of life produce a satisfaction
not otherwise possible and gives a new significance to life when the
novelty of living has worn off and when the _taedium vitae_, the
tiredness with life that comes to every one after a while, if mere
human motives prevail, steals over us.
There is a passage in the Scriptures, the truth of which a good many
people seem to doubt in the modern time, though the experience of
centuries has confirmed it. "It is more blessed to give than to
receive." Those who have experienced the delightful satisfaction of
giving whole-heartedly, even when they did not have much to give,
realize the truth of this. By comparison, the poor are the great
givers among men, giving ever so much more in proportion to their
means than do the rich, almost without exception, and it is to them
particularly that these divine words have come home. They are ready to
make all sorts of personal sacrifices to help those around them,
almost as a rule, and they know the blessedness of giving. If the rich
gave to others in anything like the proportion to what the poor so
commonly do, there would be no suffering from poverty.
The sacrifices which they make bring with them a satisfaction that is
eminently conducive to health. There is nothing like the sleep that
comes with the consciousness of good accomplished for others, and the
poor enjoy that just in proportion to the sacrifice that their doing
of good has entailed. Giving up has often meant much for others, but
it usually means more for oneself. The consciousness of having
relieved the necessities of others is probably the best appetizer and
somnifacient that we have. We talk of "sleeping the sleep of the
just", and {67} the just man is above all the one who thinks of
others. Feelings of depression and melancholy, when not actually the
consequence of organic disease or hereditary impairment of mentality,
are probably better relieved by the consciousness of doing good to
others than in any other way. This is particularly true when the doing
of good entails some special sacrifice on the doer of it. Nervousness,
in the broad general sense of that word, is at bottom very often a
manifestation of selfishness, that is, oversolicitude about oneself
and one's affairs, and nothing so serves to neutralize it as personal
sacrifices made for others.
Sacrifice, moreover, is the fundamental element in most of the
practices of religion. It represents the underlying factor of charity
and fasting and mortification, for personal sacrifices have to be made
of time and money and often of inclination and immediate personal
satisfaction in order to accomplish these. As they are treated in
separate chapters, they need only be mentioned here as representing
component elements in that readiness to make sacrifices for the sake
of others and oneself which Providence seems to demand.
Nothing requires so much sacrifice from men and women, even to the
giving up of life itself, as war, and yet when whole-heartedly entered
into, it becomes a magnificent discipline of humanity, affording
satisfactions that are supreme and leaving memories that are the most
precious for the race. Above all, men learn in time of war that there
are things in life that are worth more than life itself, and there is
no knowledge in the world that is so precious for mankind as this.
How much war's sacrifices may mean for the development of character
Professor William James has {68} emphasized in his essay on the "Moral
Equivalent of War." He confesses the paradox, but he says:
"Ask all our millions, north and south, whether they would vote now
(were such a thing possible) to have our war for the Union expunged
from history, and the record of a peaceful transition to the present
time substituted for that of its marches and battles, and probably
hardly a handful of eccentrics would say yes. Those ancestors, those
efforts, those memories and legends, are the most ideal part of what
we now own together, a sacred spiritual possession worth more than
all the blood poured out. Yet ask those same people whether they
would be willing in cold blood to start another civil war now to
gain another similar possession, and not one man or woman would vote
for the proposition."
It must not be forgotten that strengthening of character, war's
invariable effect on the man of moral aims, always diminishes the
dreads of life. They mean ever so much not only for the development of
the psychoneuroses and the whole domain of neurotic symptoms so common
in our time, but also for the exaggeration of the symptoms of real
physical disease which makes patients so uncomfortable, or full of
complaints, and has led to so many useless operations in our
generation.
Professor James even ventured to suggest that "the dread hammer (of
war) is the welder of men into cohesive states, and nowhere but in
such states can human nature adequately develop its capacity. The only
alternative is degeneration." He adds that "the martial type of
character can be bred without war", but only under very special
circumstances and where men have been willing to give themselves up to
a great cause. "Priests and medical men are in a fashion educated to
it, {69} and we should all feel some degree of it imperative if we
were conscious of our work as an obligatory service to the State. We
should be owned, as soldiers are by the army, and our pride would
arise accordingly. We could be poor then without humiliation, as army
officers now are."
Mr. H. G. Wells, in one of his paradoxical moods, has dwelt on how far
the sacrifices needed for military life have lifted the life of the
soldier above that of the civilian, in so far as its social value is
concerned. "When the contemporary man steps from the street of
clamorous insincere advertisement, push, adulteration, underselling
and intermittent employment into the barrack-year, he steps on to a
higher social plane, into an atmosphere of service and cooperation and
of infinitely more honorable emulations. Here at least men are not
flung out of employment to degenerate because there is no immediate
work for them to do. They are fed and drilled and trained for better
services. Here at least a man is supposed to win promotion by
self-forgetfulness and not by self-seeking."
The war spirit with its necessary sacrifices serves to lift men above
the dreads that wear away other lives and makes it very clear what the
spirit of whole-hearted sacrifice can accomplish in keeping life from
being disturbed by fear thoughts of many kinds. It might possibly be
thought that the supreme call made upon nature's power to overcome
such dreads, when combined with the extreme physical efforts that war
often calls for and the draft upon nature's resources that the healing
of wounds demands, would surely shorten the lives of military men, and
that soldiers and officers, but above all these latter, would have on
the average much less expectancy of life than the rest of mankind.
Apart from actual fatal {70} wounds, this is not true, however, but on
the contrary men who have suffered severely from wounds, who have been
placed under heavy burdens of responsibility and have gone through
trials that would seem calculated to exhaust nature's powers, have
lived far beyond the average length of life and even long beyond the
vast majority of men. Lord Roberts, wounded over and over again, once
shot almost to pieces, getting his Victoria Cross for bravery of the
highest type, lived, still active, well past eighty and died from
pneumonia behind the lines in the Great War quite as any man of the
generation after his might have done. Sir Evelyn Wood is another
typical instance of this living well beyond eighty in the enjoyment of
health and strength and power to be of use to his country.
The spirit of sacrifice for a great patriotic purpose is like the
spirit of sacrifice from religious motives which blesses while it
furnishes the highest satisfactions that can come to a man. If men and
women could be brought to exercise from religious motives in time of
peace as much of the spirit of sacrifice as they do for war and
patriotism, the world would be a very wonderful place in which to
live. As it is, there are a great many who do so and whose lives have
become veritable blessings for others and yet sources of supreme
satisfaction to themselves. Their thoroughgoing faith and trust are
examples to others that make life not only ever so much easier in the
midst of hardships, but that give a new depth to the belief in
immortality, because these others whose lives are so admirable have
such a supreme faith in it that they direct all their actions to its
reflection. As Professor Osler said in delivering the Ingersoll
lecture on immortality at Harvard, a great many of us believe {71}
because there are around us persons, often those whom we love dearly,
whose lives and faith mean so much to us that their confidence in
immortality is imparted to us.
Religion is above all the motive of sacrifice that makes life more
efficient and is productive of the healthy mind in the healthy body.
It has quite equaled war in this regard, and the lives of
missionaries, when lived under the most difficult circumstances, have
often lasted long beyond even the Psalmist's limit of three-score
years and ten. I have in mind as I write a dear old missionary who is
still with us who spent twenty years with the Nez Perces Indians in
the distant West, sharing all the hardships of the tribe and yet
accomplishing very little in the matter of winning them to
Christianity until at the end of that long time his leg was broken by
a fall. The manly, uncomplaining courage with which he bore the
accident won the hearts of the warriors, and they were ready to become
Christians and to follow whole-heartedly the principles of religion
which could make a white man so completely a man in every sense of the
word as they had found their missionary. His health in the midst of
all this had been excellent, and he is now in Alaska, past eighty,
standing the climate and the trials of that country.
It is surprising how weak women, in the spirit of religious sacrifice,
accomplish what seems almost the impossible and actually live
healthier lives after they have given up everything and there is
nothing more for them to dread. We have all heard of the story of
Father Damien who so bravely went to Molokai in order to care for the
lepers, but how many know that religious women have offered themselves
for similar purposes, and not only at Molokai but at Tracadie in
Canada and in {72} Louisiana have given themselves up for life to the
care of lepers? I know from records that some of these women, after
having made the supreme sacrifice, were actually better in health
living among the lepers than they had been when apparently living
under much more favorable circumstances in their city homes. Some of
them have lived to be very old, and none of them have contracted the
disease. The story of such a striking personal sacrifice as that of
Father Damien among the lepers at Molokai, crowned by years of
suffering and death, attracts sensational attention, but it must not
be forgotten that he is only one of many who have given up all in
similar spirit. There were many like him, though utterly unknown to
the world, who in China, in distant India, in Central Africa, or among
the Indians in our own country, have sacrificed everything that the
world deems most satisfying just to give themselves to the care of
their savage brothers. I shall never forget dropping off years ago one
day in the West at the then little station of Missoula in Montana to
meet an old teacher of mine who had been famous for his knowledge of
Greek and of the Aristotelian philosophy and who was then engaged in
taking care of Indians, where none of these special intellectual
acquirements were of any service, but where his hearty good cheer made
him the best of missionaries. He had made his sacrifice; he said there
were plenty of others who could do the teaching of Greek and
philosophy, and he felt the call to do something for others who needed
his personal services. He was in better health than he had been in
years and in better spirits, and there was a look about him which
indicated that some of the hundred-fold promised to those who give to
the Lord was already coming back to him.
{73}
Many a man and woman in this country and in England has been lifted
out of the depths, even out of the very "slough of despond" where
dreads abound and a healthy mind in a healthy body is almost
impossible of attainment, by reading about the work of Doctor Wilfred
Grenfell, who has so nobly given himself and his professional services
to the care of the poor fishermen on the Labrador coast. Their
sufferings are often so severe as to be almost unbearable, especially
during the winter time, and yet they cling to their little homes on
the rugged coast, ready to bear through successive winters the
vicissitudes of a climate and the bitter struggle for existence which
seem almost beyond the endurance of human nature and where they need
so much the sympathy and kindliness which have been extended to them
by Doctor Grenfell. Any one who has come in contact with him
personally learns that this spirit of sacrifice so finely exemplified
and exercised to high achievement has made him a charmingly
sympathetic man whom everybody who comes to know is sure to like, and
who exhibits the best traits of the race in some of their highest
forms of expression. Withal he is a very practical, common-sense
individual grafted on the lofty idealist. His sacrifices have done him
good, and the example of them has stimulated and helped an immense
number of other people besides the special objects of his devotion on
the Labrador coast.
What marvelous examples men can give in this way, examples which
fairly quicken life in other and weaker brethren and set them at their
tasks whole-heartedly to accomplish whatever they can when otherwise
they would have been discouraged and downcast and apt to find excuses
in poor health or weakness, is well illustrated {74} by Doctor
Grenfell's life and also by that of many others in our own day. I
count it as one of the privileges of life to have been a close friend
for some precious years of the man of whom one of those who came in
contact with him has told the story which I shall quote. His example
was all the more striking because it had for background that flagrant
exhibition of the selfishness of men which a rush to new gold fields
always presents. He was engaged in quite a different quest that for
him seemed much more important, and he went on with his work in the
midst of the excitement as calmly as if men all around him were not
exhausting all their natural powers to the limit for a fancied prize
which they were sure would make them happy.
"All of us can remember the mad rush for gold to the Klondyke, out
on the northern edge of the world. Nature has pushed her ice
barriers far to the south of it and fringed them for leagues with
impenetrable forest and towering mountain and treacherous river, as
though to guard her treasure. Men, lured by the golden gleams,
essayed to break through. In tens of thousands they plunged into the
unknown wilderness, pushing in frenzied haste through forest and
canyon and river.
"By thousands they fell and died, and but a remnant crept out on the
deadly Yukon plain, every step on which was a fight for life.
"Some of the first of these hardy adventurers were making their way
across the frozen Alaskan waste when they saw ahead something moving
that stood out black against the blinding white of the snow.
Stumbling through snowdrifts, waist-deep in ice hollows, jumping
treacherous crevasses, they pushed on, and the dark spot gradually
took shape. It was a loaded dog-sledge, and {75} in front, hauling
laboriously, were a man and a dog. He was alone, and they stared in
wonder at him, as if to ask what manner of man was this, so
contentedly traveling in this land of dreadful silence,--a land that
seemed to be the tomb of all living things that ventured into it. He
gave them cheery greeting as they passed by, stopping not, for here
the race was to the swift and strong, and wished them good fortune.
Their guide knew him, and they learned with astonishment that it was
not love of gold that had made him risk his life on that frozen
tundra. That gray-haired man with the kindly face, buffeted by the
icy wind that cut like a whiplash, and bent low under the sledge
rope, was the best-known man in the Klondyke. His sledge was loaded
with medicine and food for poor sick miners, 'his boys', as he
called them, whom he kindly cared for in a hospital that with his
own hands he had helped to build in the town in the valley of gold.
They saw him next day, as he came down the street, still harnessed
to the sledge; they saw the crowds that rushed from the canvas
buildings on either side and pressed forward to shake his hand, and
laughingly take the sledge from him, and swing along the street,
filling it from side to side, to where at the far end stood his
hospital; they saw him enter, and when they heard the shout of joy
that burst forth from the inmates, at the sight of the only man that
stood between them and death, tears sprang to their eyes, and they
too pressed forward to exchange a word with and press the hand of a
hero. Too soon there came a day when the axe and the sledge rope
fell from the once strong hands, and he lay, dead, among the boys
whom he loved. They buried him In the frozen earth between his
hospital and his church."
The making of sacrifices for religious motives, that is, {76} from a
religious sense of duty, is often followed by some of the most
satisfying rewards of life. Physicians frequently have this brought
home to them when they encounter people who, because of unwillingness
to make what seemed to be sacrifices in their earlier years, have to
go through some rather serious conditions later on in life. The woman
who, having had opportunities to marry, has refused them because she
fears the cares of family life and dreads the dangers of maternity,
will very often suffer ever so much more during the years of
involution and obsolescence in the second half of life as the result
of the loneliness that will come to her and the lack of any heart
interest in life which will leave her without the resources and
satisfaction which come to the woman whose children are around her and
whose grandchildren bless her. The man who has remained a bachelor
will very often, unless, perhaps, some of his brothers and sisters
have married and taken the trouble and had the joy of raising
children, be even more pitiable in his solitary old age. This may not
seem to mean much for health and happiness, and there may appear more
sentimentality than reality in it, but the statistics of suicide and
insanity among the unmarried, which are ever so much higher than among
the married, demonstrate how much of hopeless discouragement and
mental discomfort comes to those who have given no hostages to fortune
and no pledges for the future, by the sacrifice of some of the passing
pleasures and selfish satisfactions of youth.
Nearly the same thing is true of the married folk who have only a
child or two in the family. The children are almost inevitably
spoiled. A careful study of the single child in the family has shown
very clearly how nervous and selfish the solitary child is likely to
be and how {77} much unhappiness the mother prepares for her child by
refusing to give it the normal companionship of brothers and sisters.
The real kindergarten of life should be the family of five [Footnote
4] or six children raised together and learning to bear with each
other and yield to each other and take care of each other as the
highest kind of training in unselfishness. Even when there are two
children in the family, especially if these are of opposite sexes, the
boy and girl are likely to grow up with entirely wrong notions as
regards their importance in life. The whole household is centered
around them, and they learn how to impose on father and mother. Nearly
always the parents prepare unhappiness for themselves as well as their
children, though there is usually the excuse that they will be better
able to provide for fewer children, afford them a better education,
and bring them up so as to secure for them more opportunities in life.
[Footnote 4: Dr. Karl Pearson, of London, the well-known authority
on eugenics, has investigated rather carefully the health of
children in large and small families, and has demonstrated that
children are healthiest when there are five to eight children in the
family. On the average, first and second children are not as healthy
as those who come later in the family, and those who are in the best
condition physically and mentally for life come after the fourth.
The early children in the family are more liable to epilepsy and
certain serious nervous diseases, and are often of unstable nervous
equilibrium, while the later children are more gifted and are likely
to live longer.]
The sacrifices of social pleasures and of passing ease and comfort in
order to bear and raise four or more children in the family are, as a
rule of nature, amply rewarded in the health and strength of both the
children and the mother. In my book on "Health through Will Power", in
the chapter on Feminine Ills and the Will, I have pointed out that in
spite of the tradition which assumes that a woman's health is hurt if
she has more than {78} two or three children, the women of the older
time, when families were larger, were healthier on the average than
they are now, in spite of all the progress that medicine and surgery
have since made in relieving serious ills. Above all, it was typically
the mother of numerous children who lived long and in good health to
be a blessing to those around her, and not the old maids or the
childless wives, for longevity is not a special trait of these latter
classes of women. The modern dread of deterioration of vitality as the
result of frequent child-bearing is quite without foundation in the
realities of human experience. Some rather carefully made statistics
demonstrate that the old tradition in the matter is not merely an
impression but a veritable truth as to human nature's reaction to a
great natural call. While the mothers of large families born in the
slums, with all the handicaps of poverty as well as hard work against
them, die on the average much younger than the generality of women in
the population, careful study of the admirable vital statistics of New
South Wales shows that the mothers who lived longest were those who
under reasonably good conditions bore from five to seven children.
Here in America, a study of more favored families shows that the
healthiest children come from the large families, and it is in the
small families particularly that the delicate, neurotic and generally
weakly children are found. Alexander Graham Bell, in his investigation
of the Hyde family here in America, discovered that the greatest
longevity occurred in the families of ten or more children. So far
from mothers being exhausted by the number of children that were born,
and thus endowing their children with less vitality than if they had
fewer children, it was to the numerous offspring that the highest
vitality {79} and physical fitness were given. One special consequence
of these is longevity.
The spirit of sacrifice brings its own reward. The realization from a
religious standpoint that it is better to give than to receive is one
of the greatest blessings that a man can have. Nothing is so
disturbing to health and happiness--and real happiness always reacts
on health--as selfishness, the contradiction of the spirit of
sacrifice. All the great writers on the spiritual life have emphasized
the fact that nervousness is at bottom selfishness. Conceit is the
root of a great deal of unhappiness and consequent disturbance of the
health of mind and body.
{80}
CHAPTER IV
CHARITY
Charity is usually looked upon as a cure for social, not personal
ills. Its activities, while recognized as supremely effective in
fostering the health of people who have to live on inadequate means,
are not ordinarily considered as reacting to benefit the health of the
individual who practices the virtue. Any such outlook is, however,
very partial. Religion has always taught that the benefiting of others
invariably served to bring down blessings on those who took up the
precious duty of helpfulness, blessings which are not reserved merely
for the hereafter, but are felt also in this world, which affect not
only the spirit but the mind of man. "Blessed are the merciful, for
they shall obtain mercy" are the words of the Sermon on the Mount, and
it must not be forgotten that that dear old-fashioned word, mercy,
which is so often limited to forgiveness in our day, meant in the old
time acts of benevolence--"works of mercy", as they were called--and
in Luke it is stated that the "neighbor unto him that fell among
thieves" was "he that showed mercy on him."
The personal satisfaction which comes from the performance of these
works of mercy represents one of the most active factors that we have
for good health and especially for the creation of that background of
contentment with life on which good health is commonly {81} developed.
The merciful garner some of their reward here in the shape of a less
troubled life, so far at least as their own worries might be sources
of trouble, and a fuller, heartier existence in the consciousness of
helpfulness for others. The words encouragement, discouragement, in
Saxon English heartening and disheartening, putting heart into or
taking heart out of people, have a literal physical as well as
metaphysical significance that all physicians have come to appreciate
rather thoroughly.
Charity is a cure not only for the ills of the social body, but it is
also an extremely valuable remedy for the personal ills of those who
devote themselves to doing their duty towards others. Vincent de Paul,
that great organizer of charity, or as we would call his work in our
time, social service--for during and after the great wars in France in
the early seventeenth century he organized relief for literally
thousands of people in the war zone and afterwards continued his great
social work, which was quite as much needed then as our post-war work
is now, in the large cities and towns of France--once used an
expression in this regard that deserves to be repeated here because it
emphasizes this reactionary effect of charity which means so much for
health. Vincent said that "Unless the charity we do does as much good
for the doer as it does for the one for whom it is done, there is
something wrong with the charity." Here is a phase of charity that has
been forgotten only too often in the modern time. It emphasizes the
fact that the most important remedy for that very serious affection
_taedium vitae_, that sense of the unsatisfactoriness of life which
comes to everybody at some time or other, is the doing of things for
other people with a whole-hearted feeling of helpfulness.
{82}
It has been suggested that the doing of good for others, with all the
good effects which flow from it for the active participants, may very
well be accomplished without any appeal to religion, and that sympathy
alone suffices as a foundation. Sir W. Thistleton-Dyer, in reviewing
Huxley's position in this matter in a critique of Clodd's "Life of
Huxley", suggests that the mystery would still remain as to how the
sympathy is to be infused. He adds: "My experience of human nature
inclines me to think that it requires a more powerful appeal to the
imagination than is afforded by a mere academic council of perfection
of this sort." As a matter of fact Altruism, as it has been called, is
a very different thing from charity in its effect upon the doer. The
deep feeling of the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God with
which true charity is associated makes a profoundly impressive
suggestion, with a favorable emotional tendency which serves to give
almost as a rule and quite naturally a sense of well-being. The
practice of charity from religious motives becomes, then, a very
different thing from any mere feeling of sympathy with others founded,
as it is so likely to be, on the selfish feeling of how painful it
would be for us to be in like case, or tinged at least with the
consciousness of condescension toward those below us which vitiates
most of the good motives of doing for others on any human grounds.
For those who feel that the new Altruism may fully replace the old
charity, and that people can derive just as much good from the
stirring of their sympathies from merely humanitarian motives as they
can from religious love of their neighbor, President Schurman of
Cornell said some things that are very interesting:
"It is a blessed characteristic of our own age that {83} religion
has come to express itself so nobly in practical well-doing. But
beneficence is not piety. To make the love of man the essence of
religion is to misread the latter and to divest the former of its
supreme spiritual dynamic. If the religious man is a benediction to
earth, it is because his soul is bathed in the dews of heaven."
The relief of the serious physical sufferings of those around us,
together with the glimpse so often afforded while engaged in that work
of the patience with which real ills are borne by others, is the best
possible dispeller of the dreads which are the source of so many
psycho-neuroses and the neurotic symptoms which complicate other
diseases of modern times. These represent a much larger proportion of
the ills of mankind than we were inclined to think. The Great War
proved a revelation in this regard, for one third of all the
dismissions from the English army, apart from the wounded, were made
because of neurotic affections. Manifestly they must occupy an
important place also in civil life. Those who practice charity, that
is, those who not merely supply material aid to be distributed through
agents or almoners, but give their personal service for those in need,
have the chance to be impressed with the thought of how much worse
things might be with themselves than they actually are, and how
thankful they should be for their own conditions. The best practical
definition of contentment still continues to be the conviction that
things might be worse than they actually are. Indeed, it is this very
satisfaction that comes from doing good that tempts people, humanly
speaking, to do more and more of it, and the personal service habit,
once formed, is as hard to break as almost any other habit that a man
can contract.
{84}
The word charity has come to have in many minds a very unfortunate
innuendo. It is associated with the thought of doling out alms, of
pauperizing people and of making them dependent on others instead of
arousing their power to help themselves. There are a good many people
who seem to think that never until our time did the question of
organizing charity, or social service as it is called, come into men's
minds in such a way as to prevent these unfortunate abuses of charity
which do so much more harm than good. The history of social service
does not begin in our time, however, but goes back over all the
centuries in the history of Christianity. Religion has always
furnished the incentive to do good, but the Church and common sense
have helped people to regulate their charity in such a way as to make
it really useful to men. During the Middle Ages there were many legal
regulations against "sturdy vagrants" who imposed on people and took
the charity out of the mouths of those who deserved it and who abused
the opportunities for treatment in hospitals or for lodging in places
provided for the poor. Human nature has not changed much, and the
tramp and the wanderer have always been with us, as well as the man
who is willing to "give up", and let others take care of him.
Charity, as its Latin etymology suggests, means the dearness of others
to us. It is our personal interest in them that constitutes its
essence and not at all the mere giving of something or even the doing
of something in order to be relieved from the necessity of thinking
about them. Dear old Sir Thomas Browne, in his "Religio Medici", put
the whole question of charity very succinctly when he said, "this I
think charity, to love God for Himself and our neighbor for God."
Milton summed {85} up the complete quintessence of religion in the
single word charity quite as Doctor Browne did, though with less
aphoristic effectiveness. "Our whole practical dutie in religion is
contained in charitie, or the love of God and our neighbor." Charity
in this sense is a development of Christianity, and the personal
service idea is almost unknown in ancient times. Lecky, in his history
of European morals, says that "the active, habitual and detailed
charity of private persons, which is so conspicuous a feature in all
Christian societies, was scarcely known in antiquity, and there are
not more than two or three moralists who have noticed it."
It is the love or affection that goes with whatever is done that is
the real essence of charity. It is this quality especially which makes
the charity of benefit to the doer. This helps him and above all her
to eliminate that super-conscious preoccupation with self which has
become the bane of existence in modern times. It is at the root of
more serious physical and mental symptoms than any other single factor
that we have in pathology. Anything that will take people out of
themselves, that will interest them in others and keep them from
thinking about themselves, will do an immense amount of good in
helping to maintain their good health, but above all will keep people
from exaggerating feelings of all kinds, some of them scarcely more
than normal, a great many of them merely physiological, into symptoms
which seem to indicate serious disease and sometimes to portend
extremely serious consequences. Charity that really touches the heart
is a panacea for more ills than any remedy we have. It will make even
those who are sufferers from genuine disease often of severe or almost
fatal character ever so much more comfortable, and it has {86}
furnished some invalids with such occupation of mind and heart as has
enabled them to do a great deal of good in the world. A great many of
us know of one bedridden lady, utterly unable to sit up, who has
succeeded in organizing throughout the country branches of an
extremely valuable organization which helps the poor to provide proper
clothing for their infants and has saved many lives and made many
homes happier.
There are a great many people who are afraid lest they should do harm
by their charity and who apparently fail to realize that it is their
own selfishness which takes refuge in the excuse that doing things for
others may possibly pauperize the objects of their beneficence. As
John Ruskin reminded us in "Sesame and Lilies", it is extremely
important not to let ourselves be deceived by any of the very common
talk of "indiscriminate charity." He adds, in one of those passages of
his that only he could write and that are so full of the meat of
thought for those who care to think about such subjects:
"The order to us is not to feed the deserving hungry, nor the
industrious hungry, nor the amiable and well-intentioned hungry, but
simply to feed the hungry. It is quite true, infallibly true, that
if any man will not work, neither should he eat--think of that, and
every time you sit down to your dinner, ladies and gentlemen, say
solemnly, before you ask a blessing, 'How much work have I done
to-day for my dinner?' But the proper way to enforce that order on
those below you, as well as on yourselves, is not to leave vagabonds
and honest people to starve together, but very distinctly to discern
and seize your vagabond; and shut your vagabond up out of honest
people's way, and very sternly then see that, until he has worked,
he does not eat."
{87}
Works of charity under religious impulses have always constituted an
excellent resource for people inclined to be overoccupied with
themselves and who need the stimulus of contact with those in
suffering to make them realize that their own troubles are largely the
result of too much preoccupation with trifling discomforts of various
kinds or even with symptoms of various affections which must be borne
and which will cause much less suffering and general disturbance of
health if there is the distraction of sincere and deep interest in
others. Anything that will act as a brake on the working of the Law of
Avalanche which is discussed in the chapter on Pain and which serves
to increase all suffering through subjective influences will do human
beings a great deal of good. As a rule nothing is so effective in this
direction as preoccupation with the much severer ills of other people.
The seven corporal works of mercy, as they were called, that is, the
seven modes of succoring those in need which St. Paul suggested every
Christian should practice, are particularly valuable for the neurotic
individuals whom, like the poor and needy, we have always with us, but
who have multiplied so much more in this generation because a great
many people have not enough to occupy their time properly, but above
all have not enough exercise of their heart impulses and their
affections to satisfy this imperative need of humanity. Women
particularly must be afforded, as a rule, the opportunity to mother
somebody who requires their care. If they have no children of their
own, and with the loosening of the bonds of religion more and more of
them have not, then they will seldom be happy unless the chance is
provided for them to devote the emotional side of their {88} natures
to other human beings who need them and whose needs constitute the
best possible opportunity for the exercise of the spiritual side of
this precious function.
The seven corporal works of mercy are:
(1) To feed the hungry;
(2) To give drink to the thirsty;
(3) To clothe the naked;
(4) To harbor the harborless;
(5) To visit and ransom the captive;
(6) To visit the sick; and
(7) To bury the dead.
These represented a list of very definite duties which children were
taught to repeat from memory when they were young; and they were told
very simply that if they did not take the opportunity to perform them
they were really not doing their Christian duty. To visit the sick,
for instance, meant not only to spend an hour or two with a sick
relative, but to seek out those who were sick and poor and had no one
to care for them and make some provision for them. Some of the old
hospital visiting customs in this regard are extremely interesting,
inasmuch as they reveal the resource that this must have been to
people who are usually thought of as being occupied solely with social
duties in the much narrower sense of the term. Martin Luther tells in
one of his letters that during his visit to Italy about four hundred
years ago, one of the things that proved a great source of edification
to him was the fact that the ladies of the nobility in the Italian
cities made it a custom to visit the hospitals regularly and to spend
hours at a time there and do things for the patients with their own
hands. Some of them wore veils while they were performing this
beautiful service in order that they might not be recognized, lest
what they did should come to be talked about, and they did not want to
practice their charity for the sake of publicity. The people of the
old time were often as intent on avoiding publicity as our generation,
as a rule, {89} seems to be intent on securing it. Almost needless to
say ostentatious philanthropy is not charity and has none of the
reactionary good effects for the doer to be found in real charity.
It must not be forgotten that whenever hospitals are visited regularly
thus by the better-to-do classes there is very little likelihood of
serious abuses creeping into them. The care of even the very poor
patients is kept at a high standard because these visitors see the
beginnings of abuses and either bring about their correction at once,
or else devote themselves to some modification of hospital routine
that will prevent the recurrence of such unfortunate conditions.
Religion thus proved a stimulus to the better care of the ailing poor
that was a distinct benefit to the health of the community. It was
when hospitals ceased to be the object of such attention on the part
of the better-to-do people that they ran down into the awful condition
which prevailed so generally in them even less than a century ago.
Burdett in his "History of Hospitals" has not hesitated to say that
hospitals placed in the midst of cities and visited regularly by the
well-to-do represent a great social instrument for the betterment of
all sorts of social conditions. The wealthy are kept from being
selfish, the poor from being envious, the classes of the community are
not so separated that they fail to understand each other, and both of
them are greatly benefited by the experiences which bring them
together.
Burdett has gone even further and insisted that the support of
hospitals, by the State, because it removes opportunities for charity,
is an unfortunate development in modern times. Those who are well able
to help the poor and the ailing get the feeling that due provision is
{90} made for them out of the taxes, and that, therefore, no further
obligation rests upon them and the needs and requirements of the poor
are no concern of theirs. As a consequence, he says, "an increasing
number of people are being brought up on a wrong principle and are
thus led to forget the privilege and to ignore the duty of giving
toward the support of those who are unable to help themselves."
Besides pointing out how much is lost of social value and social
stimulus when private charitable institutions are replaced by State
institutions, Burdett emphasizes not only how much of social good is
accomplished by voluntary charity, but also how much of personal
relief is afforded to some of the trials of life that often prove the
source of unfortunate pathological conditions. He said: "Apart from
the evils we have briefly referred to, there is a loss to the whole
community in the lessened moral sense which State institutions create.
The voluntary charities afford an opening for the encouragement and
expression of the best of all human feelings,--sympathy between man
and man. They give to the rich an opening for the display of
consideration toward the poor which is fruitful in results. They
create a feeling of widespread sympathy with those who suffer and
impress on the population the duty of almsgiving to an extent which no
other charity can do. They constitute a neutral platform whereon all
classes and sects can meet with unanimity and good feeling. They
provide a field of labor wherein some of the most devoted and best
members of society can cultivate the higher feelings of humanity and
learn to bear their own sufferings and afflictions with resignation
and patience."
I have made it a practice for years, now, when women {91} who were
without children and without any special outlet for their affections
suffered from neurotic symptoms, to prescribe that they get in touch
with the ailing poor in some way. Especially for those trying patients
who complain of inability to sleep well, a feeling of depression when
they awake, a lack of appetite, but also a lack of incentive to do
anything and a tendency to stay much in the house and by themselves, a
condition which not infrequently develops in childless women shortly
before and after what is called "the change of life", no prescription
is so valuable as hospital visiting, or where that is impossible for
some reason, at least to make it a rule to visit sick friends
regularly. I have seen women suffering severely from neurotic symptoms
that made life miserable for them become not only quite reconciled to
existence, sleep better and eat better, but actually find some of
their first real satisfaction in life as the result of discovering
that they could visit the orthopedic ward of a hospital regularly,
tell stories to the crippled children and bring them little toys, help
to make Easter and the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving Day and
Christmas and New Year's happier for them. I have known women who
thought after some serious domestic affliction that they could never
be happy again, to find, if not happiness, at least satisfaction in
life after they had visited a cancer home regularly for some time and
had seen with what cheerfulness patients could face the inevitably
fatal affection which they knew was gradually sapping life and
carrying them day by day into the shadow of death. No therapeusis that
I know is so valuable for the stony grief without tears that some
women exhibit after a great loss as the ward for crippled children or
some regular visiting of incurable patients.
{92}
To visit and ransom the captives, that is, to visit prisoners and help
them in any way possible, is a work of mercy that comparatively few
people in our day seem to think they are under any obligations to do
merely because they are Christians. They took this duty very seriously
in the older time, however, and the result was excellent for the
prisoners as well as for those who visited them. When condemned to
serve a sentence and then left to wear out prison existence for years
as best he can, seeing only his fellow prisoners and his keepers, a
prisoner is very likely to grow bitter. In not a few of the prisoners,
health of body and even of mind gives way under these hard conditions.
If the prisoners were visited at definite intervals by some one
willing to listen a little patiently to their story, for there is
always another side to every story--even though the other side may not
be very true--and who would occasionally bring them little things like
tobacco as a solace or reading matter to occupy idle hours, and who
would promise to interest himself in securing any favors that were
possible and to see that they were given advantage of every benefit
allowed them by the law, they would have less of the feeling that they
were outcasts of society. It is because the corporal works of mercy as
representing serious Christian duties somehow have come to be
neglected that we have had this rather disturbing social problem of
the bitter-minded prisoner so likely to get into prison again thrust
upon us. But it is also because of the lack of such a fine human
interest as is afforded by contact with prisoners who show some hope
of reform that many an overoccupied business man suffers from such
profound weariness of life that rest cures and special vacations have
to be prescribed for him.
{93}
I once had a bachelor friend whom I had known for many years come to
me as a patient, and though he had been a model of common sense, whom
I had been accustomed to think of as utterly without nerves, I was
surprised to find how many neurotic symptoms were gradually developing
in him. He had lost his sister who had made a home life and a heart
interest for him, and he had no near relatives; he had nothing but his
business to occupy him; he had no hobby and no interest in that
direction that seemed likely to develop, and I wondered what I should
advise him to occupy himself with to keep him from getting further on
his own nerves. He had an extremely important and correspondingly
difficult position involving the carrying of a heavy burden of
responsibility for a great many rather complex details of a huge
business. A chance remark of his own in pity for a young fellow whom
his corporation had found cheating and had felt itself compelled to
prosecute--for example's sake--led me to suggest the visiting of
prisoners. For years that man spent several hours on two or three
Sundays of every month visiting the prisoners of a large city. He
gathered around him a group of men who found a good deal of
satisfaction in that work. He himself began to sleep better and wiped
off the slate of life a series of dreads and obsessions that he was
beginning to foster. Men often talk of "the blue devils" getting hold
of them, but it is often just a case of the devil finding work not for
idle hands but for idle hearts. Especially at Christmas and Easter he
used to have as good a time, in the best sense of that expression,
with his "little brothers" of the prison as any father and mother ever
had with a house full of children. He once told me some of his
experiences in a way that revealed his tactfulness in the {94}
handling of these sensitive fellow mortals that was one of the most
interesting revelations of the Christian gentleman I think I have ever
had given me.
To harbor the harborless as a work of mercy, when stated in this form,
seemed to me as a child, when I learned it in the catechism, some
wonderful exhibition of charity for shipwrecked mariners. I could not
help but think that it must be harborless sailors who needed to be
harbored. Stories of even two or three generations ago here in America
show how seriously this Christian duty of the old-fashioned words was
taken. There are still many country places, in the mountains of
Kentucky and Tennessee particularly, where a family will take in a
stranger for the night if he happens to be in their neighborhood. They
will give him his supper and breakfast too--or they would a few years
ago--and likely would be insulted if he offered to pay for them. They
have performed a simple duty of hospitality which comes down to them
by tradition from the older time. A man who is still alive told me
that when he was young, and two or three of his brothers slept in the
bed with him, occasionally they would find, when they woke in the
morning, that father had taken in a stranger during the night, and
since there was no other place for him than the children's big bed on
the floor, the children had been crowded over and room had been made
for him with them. This happened not in the south, but in
Pennsylvania. I know that my old grandmother long ago, living in a
one-roomed house with an attic, used to take in the "greenhorns" from
Ireland in this manner and give the men shelter and food until they
could get a job; and give the girls who came a lodging and a chance to
learn something about plain American cooking and the care {95} of a
house until they would be ready to take a place in service.
Almost needless to say, this exercise of hospitality proved a very
interesting diversion for people whose lives were rather monotonous. I
feel sure that it must have meant much for the relief of that
dissatisfaction with life because it lacks variety which is so often
the first symptom of a neurosis. The stranger brought the news from a
distance; the "greenhorns" brought news from Ireland, and many things
were talked over while they ate their meals or sat around the fire in
the evening, and it proved real entertainment. This was not the motive
for which the charity was offered, for that was, as a rule, as
Christian as it could be, but it represented that reward which is so
often--it cannot but be divinely--attached to a good deed and which
brings so much satisfaction with it.
Our entertainment of guests, as a rule, is very different. Above all
it entails no personal effort. Even when people are invited to dinner
nowadays, hostesses seem to consider it necessary to ask somebody to
entertain them, for if they should be permitted to entertain
themselves or be asked to make an effort to make their own
conversation entertaining, they would probably be almost bored to
death. Is it any wonder that our fulfilment of so-called social duties
often proves nerve-racking and a season of it must be followed by a
rest cure while old-fashioned hospitality did good to the doer and the
recipient? Ours is the selfish striving of social aspirations; theirs
was an exercise of real charity, an external expression of the
dearness of fellow mortals.
Above all, the presence in a household of an occasional guest who is
not a relative is good for family life. It {96} relieves the monotony,
often relaxes domestic tension, gives a new zest to living and cements
personal friendships.
To feed the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty and to clothe the
naked were, in the Christian ritual of corporal works of mercy, not
obligations to be accomplished by writing one's name on a piece of
bank paper and passing it over to a social service society of some
kind, nor by handing a few bills to some almoner who distributes
condescendingly your dole to the poor. Some one has very well said
that the only action calling for any reward in such activities is the
effort required to write one's signature or reach into the pocket for
the money. The rest of the transaction is only a matter of debit and
credit on a bank balance and makes practically no difference in most
cases to the individual who gives it. The most compelling motive for
charity in our time is that you might as well give up to fifteen per
cent of your income, for if you do not the government will take it
anyhow. So have the satisfaction of getting ahead of Uncle Sam.
Charity in the older time was thought to be actual, personal work for
others. It is this personal service which carries its reward with it,
often by provision of needed physical exercise, always by happy
occupation of mind, affording the opportunity for the satisfaction of
heart impulses with the many other personal reactions which enter into
true charity.
Religious teaching furnishes an abundance of examples of even kings
and queens and the higher nobility and of wealthy merchants and their
wives who devoted themselves to personal service in the performance of
these works of mercy. St. Louis of France, St. Ferdinand of Castille,
St. Catherine of Siena, though she was only a dyer's daughter in this
group of notabilities, {97} St. Elizabeth of Hungary, St. Margaret of
Scotland and the good Queen Maud her daughter, Dick Whittington (of
the cat), Lord Mayor of London and many others,--all these were held
up as symbols of what people ought to do in the matter of personal
service.
There is often the feeling at the present time that when people give
to charity it is not infrequently because they have heard some recent
harrowing reports of the condition of the poor or have been brought in
contact with some particularly pitiable case, and that the memory of
these is likely to recur to them and intrude on their social
satisfactions unless they can do something to make them feel that they
have at least tried to fulfill their duty in the way of affording
relief. A merchant on the way home from business who meets a beggar on
the streets knows that as a rule, if he gives money, it will do harm
rather than good, but he knows too that when he is comfortably seated
after dinner before the fire, with his coffee and his cigar before
him, if the thought of the beggar that he refused comes to him, it
will make him uncomfortable. To give with the idea of avoiding such
discomforts is, of course, not charity, but refined selfishness, and
it is no wonder that it lacks the surpassing sense of satisfaction
which helps so much in making life more full of the feeling of
usefulness. This is not the charity that does as much good for the
doer as for the receiver of it.
In our time settlement work, neighborhood houses and the like have
represented this personal service which religion in the older time
listed under the various titles of the corporal works of mercy. Many
physicians have learned that young women particularly who had not very
much to do, indeed perhaps no definite duties and yet {98} had an
abundance of vital energy which had to be expended in some way, found
very interesting and satisfying occupation of mind in connection with
settlement work. Above all they secured an opportunity for the
exercise of the heart impulses, so natural to women, and which must
almost as necessarily be expended on something as the physical
energies which they develop every day must be employed in some sort of
labor if they are not to be short-circuited and make them miserable.
It is perfectly possible and even easy to pervert heart impulses which
might be the source of good for self and others, into sexuality of
various kinds, whether that be exhibited in philanderings with the
male dancers employed by the hotels to make _thes dansants_
interesting for feminine youth--and also idle middle age--or in love
affairs with the family chauffeur. They will find an issue some way
almost inevitably. It may be that writing notes to the latest matinee
idol or even letting one's feelings be properly harrowed up at
performances of sex-problem plays may prove sufficient for a time, but
something more will be demanded before long, and there must be
something real to satisfy natural cravings.
There is probably no better safeguard against the tendency of the
young heart to overflow on unworthy objects than to give it the
opportunity to exercise itself on unselfish aims which lead up to the
fine satisfactions to be derived from helpfulness for others.
Settlement work and cognate personal activities have so organized the
opportunity for this that young women do not have to travel in
perilous neighborhoods except under such circumstances as reasonably
assure their safety from insult or aggression of any kind. The charity
that prompts occupation with such activities often leads to {99} a
development of character, while at the same time affording such
exercise of body and mind as greatly promotes that eminently desirable
end,--the possession of a healthy mind in a healthy body. There is
much discussion at the present time over sex dangers for young people,
but it must not be forgotten that these are mainly due to the sexual
incitements which we are fostering in the dance hall and the theater
and the cabaret supper room, while the best possible corrective for
sexual erethism is to be found in contact with some of the misery of
the world. The remedy is at hand, but unfortunately it is not made use
of as a rule, and we wonder why evils increase as selfishness becomes
more rampant.
John Ruskin summed up the situation with regard to the young women of
our time in his address on The Mystery of Life and its Arts ("Sesame
and Lilies"), in words that deserve to be in the notebook of every one
who hopes to be able to help the young over some of the difficult
parts of their path through life in our time.
"You may see continually girls who have never been taught to do a
single useful thing thoroughly; who cannot sew, who cannot cook, who
cannot cast an account, nor prepare a medicine, whose whole life has
been passed either in play or in pride; you will find girls like
these, when they are earnest-hearted, cast all their innate passion
of religious spirit, which was meant by God to support them through
the irksomeness of daily toil, into grievous and vain meditation
over the meaning of the great Book, of which no syllable was ever
yet to be understood but through a deed; all the instinctive wisdom
and mercy of their womanhood made vain, and the glory of their pure
consciences warped into fruitless agony concerning questions which
the laws of common, serviceable life {100} would have either solved
for them in an instant, or kept out of their way. Give such a girl
any true work that will make her active in the dawn and weary at
night, with the consciousness that her fellow creatures have indeed
been the better for her day, and the powerless sorrow of her
enthusiasm will transform itself into a majesty of radiant and
beneficent peace."
The friendly visiting of the poor is an old-fashioned Christian
practice which had lapsed, unfortunately, until it was restored to
some extent at least by the great work of Frederick Ozanam of Paris.
The conferences of St. Vincent de Paul organized by him in Paris while
he was professor of the university there about one hundred years ago
had for their principal object the visitation of the poor, not so much
for the purpose of giving them alms as of helping them with advice,
making them feel that there are people interested in them, and giving
them a new sense of human dignity; though also providing them with
such necessaries as they might be in immediate want of and, above all,
securing them occupations whenever they were needed. I have known many
men who have developed a new and vigorous sense of life as a
consequence of learning that they could be so useful to others as the
Ozanam organization permitted them to be.
For a great many men some such escape from the sordid routine of daily
business life is needed. This is particularly true when they have
passed a little beyond middle age, which for me is not beyond fifty,
as so many people seem to think, but thirty-five, the period indicated
by Dante in the first line of his "Divine Comedy" as marking the
mid-point of existence. After forty, particularly, most men who take
life seriously and do not merely try {101} to make money and kill the
intervening time that hangs heavily on their hands in any way that
they can, as a rule lose their interest in reading novels and do not
care for the trivial plays of our time. They need diversion. They are
not likely to get it at the opera unless they are very musically
inclined. Card-playing may prove an excellent diversion and one that
personally I think ever so much better than the reading of trivial
novels, but there are a great many men to whom it has no appeal. If
they stay at home they are likely to fall asleep in their chairs over
the evening paper or a current magazine, and nothing in the world
makes one feel so uncomfortable or so spoils an evening as to go to
sleep in that way.
If they are particularly occupied with business affairs these may
intrude themselves on their evening hours, but they very soon learn
the lesson that it is dangerous to take business home with them. They
need some serious occupation of mind quite different from what
occupies them during the day. Professional men find something of this
in the meetings of professional societies, but they too need a heart
interest, a sympathy interest for their fellow man quite as well as
the women. Many of them find it with their children as these grow up
around them, and family life will help very much. But as the children
grow older and have their own interests in the evenings, father is
more and more likely to be left by himself, and then he needs
something that will occupy him in some broad, human way. A good hobby
of any kind would be a saving grace, but hobbies, to be effective,
should be cultivated from early in life. One cannot be created easily
at need after forty.
For such men friendly visiting of the poor, for it is only in the
evenings that the man of the house can be {102} seen, since he is
always at work during the day, will often prove a most valuable
resource. In a number of instances I have suggested to men who were
beginning to get on their own nerves that they interest themselves in
this way and have been rather well satisfied with the results when
they took the advice seriously. In a few cases I have seen really
wonderful results when it seemed almost inevitable that men were
drifting into dangerous neurotic conditions because they were living
lives too narrow in their interests and above all so self-centered
that they were dwelling on slight discomforts and exaggerating them
into symptoms of disease. Contact with the suffering that one sees
among the city poor is a wonderful remedy for neurotic tendencies to
make too much of one's own feelings, for the poor almost as a rule
face the real ills of life with a simplicity and a courage that
inevitably causes any one who is brought close to them to admire them
and to feel that his own trials are trifles compared to what these
people undergo with very little whimpering.
There is another phase of charity, probably unintentional in its
activity and almost unconscious, that is extremely interesting and has
a very definite place in a discussion of health and religion. Some men
who have made a success in life far beyond their neighbors have
preferred to continue dwelling in their old home rather than move into
the quarter of the city to which their changed circumstances would
have permitted them to go. Such families represent the very best
possible kind of settlements in the poorer quarters of the city and
help more than anything else to keep a neighborhood from running down
in such a way as to make life harder for the poor who dwell there. The
old walled cities are often {103} said to have been almost intolerably
unhealthy because of the inevitable crowding of the population which
they compelled, and undoubtedly they were a fruitful source of disease
and ills of many kinds for the population; and yet it is doubtful
whether any old-time city was ever so insanitary as the slums of our
modern crowded cities were a generation ago or are even in many places
at the present time.
There was one feature of the old cities whose obliteration one cannot
help but regret. The better-to-do families often lived on the front
part of a city lot while the less well-to-do, often indeed the men who
worked for the proprietor of the house in front, lived on the back of
it. This was true particularly in many foreign cities and continued
until a few generations ago.
This arrangement kept the conditions of living, so far as regards the
middle class of the poor, from being so markedly indifferent as they
are at the present time. Those who lived in the rear knew all the
happenings, the births and deaths among their employers, while the
family in the front took an interest in the events, the births and
deaths and illnesses in the families in the rear. This proved to be
valuable for social reasons, and it kept conditions of health among
the poor from degenerating in anything like the way that has happened
in modern times. The mutual personal interests did a great deal more
to make life more satisfactory and more full of good feeling than the
relationships of classes to each other do in our time, and this
reacted to make a state of mind much more conducive to health than
would otherwise have been the case.
Such associations would seem to be almost impossible in modern days,
and yet the late Mr. Thomas Mulry, {104} president of the Immigrants
Savings Bank, at a time when, I believe, it was the largest savings
bank in the world, continued to live down among the poorer folk to
whom so much of his life was devoted for years after families of his
standing in the financial world had long moved out. Our present
governor of New York has declared his intention of continuing his
residence among his friends in the old Seventh Ward, and undoubtedly
his presence there will mean much not only for the health of those
around him, but also for the health of his family because of the
simple life which is so likely to be perpetuated in these
surroundings.
For such social work as this, religious motives are probably the most
efficient impulses. Nothing is quite so direct a denial of the
brotherhood of man that religion teaches as the tendency for people to
move away from old neighbors into the better quarters of the cities
just as soon as they are any way able. Such reasoning may seem
idealistic and impractical, but then religion is the typically ideal
and impractical thing in life which teaches that self-advantage is not
so important as advantage for all those around one, and that man's
principal duty in life is to love his neighbor as himself.
How often has it happened that the building of the new house in a new
neighborhood proves the last straw which serves to make an end of the
good health and heartiness of life which the head of the family had
enjoyed up to this time. The new habits that are necessitated, the
interference with the active life which had been customary up to this
time and above all the more luxurious living, very often with less
exercise, which come under the new conditions bring about
deterioration of health. The move is made for the sake of the {105}
young people, but it takes the old folks out of the precious, simple
habits of a life-time which meant much for the preservation of health,
so that it is no wonder that many a physician has had a patient whose
breakdown in health followed not long after the move to a new and
handsome house that carried people away from their old associations
and their old neighbors and left them without those heart resources
which are so important for the preservation of a healthy mind in a
healthy body. It is men, not things, that count in life, though that
lesson is hard for many to learn.
For a while, toward the end of the nineteenth century, owing to a
misunderstanding of the significance of the struggle for existence,
there came to be the feeling that sympathy and helpfulness for others
was somehow contrary to modern scientific principles and that it
represented at best a sentimentality that could scarcely hope to be
effective and was indeed sure to fail in the long run because it was
in opposition, though to but a very slight degree, to nature's
inevitable elimination of the weak. Further investigations in biology,
however, have revealed the fact that while the struggle for existence
is an important factor in whatever evolution takes place, mutual aid
is another factor of scarcely less importance in general and of
supreme significance within the species. While one species preys on
another, the members of the same species usually possess certain
deep-seated instincts of helpfulness. Only at times when there is
famine or when a mother is seeking food for her young do members of
the same species seriously interfere with each other's activities, or
injure each other, while a great many of them have mutually helpful
instincts that are extremely precious for personal as well as generic
developments.
{106}
The smaller living things, as the insects, dwell together in
communities and perform their duties constantly with the community
benefit rather than personal satisfaction in view. It might be said
perhaps that these small creatures would have to be gifted in some
such way to secure their preservation in the struggle for existence
and their defense against their enemies. The larger animals, however,
have the same helpful instincts. Wild horses run in droves and when
attacked by a pack of wolves--the wolves hunting in packs because they
can thus secure their prey better--the horses gather in a circle with
their heads facing in and the young foals and the mares in the center,
and only a battery of heels is presented to the attackers. Even such
large animals as elephants travel in herds, with the huge bull
elephants on the outskirts of the herd ready to hurl back any of the
big cats, the lions or tigers who might spring to get one of those
toothsome morsels, a baby elephant, traveling with its mother near the
center of the herd. Smaller animals live in villages and groups of
various kinds, and those of the same species are often helpful to each
other in many ways.
Manifestly the great law of charity in a certain basic way at least
pervades all nature. Nature may be "red in tooth and claw", but
brother animals very often have by instinct a fellow feeling that is a
factor in the preservation of the race. The idea that the discovery of
the struggle for existence and the preservation of favorite races in
that way has in any fashion neutralized the law of charity is entirely
a mistake. Men in their selfishness have occasionally asserted this,
and above all those who felt uncomfortable because their own selfish
successes were, as they could plainly see, causing a great deal of
discomfort and sometimes the ruin of others. It was {107} once
suggested that when the nurseryman wants to grow specially beautiful
American Beauty roses he is careful to eliminate all except a few
buds, so that these may have an opportunity to grow to the greatest
possible perfection, and that this same policy pursued in human
affairs led to the production of such great institutions as the
Standard Oil Company. This was a particularly odorous comparison; it
was made some twenty years ago. Almost needless to say every one sees
the absurdity of it now, though at that time there were not a few who
thought that the biological principle of the struggle for existence
justified even the hurting of rivals in order to secure success. The
Great War completed the elimination of such ideas. It was undertaken
with the thought that any nation or people who could dominate the
world was bound to do so, because that was manifest destiny for the
benefit of the race. Just as it took our Civil War to end the defense
of slavery in the United States, so it has taken the Great War to end
such pretensions and bring out the fact that mutual aid, and above all
charity undertaken out of real love for others through a divine motive
must be the rule for men, while its symbol, mutual aid among the
members of the various species, constitutes an important element for
the preservation of the various races and the working out of the great
laws that underlie all nature.
We in our generation were the inheritors of a philosophy of life
which, for a time in what has now come to be called the "silly
seventies", people thought could do away entirely with the necessity
for a Creator and with the idea of a Providence because it seemed to
them as though the suffering in the world around them contravened
_their_ notion of an all-wise Power capable of {108} relieving suffering
and yet not doing so. The doctrine of the survival of the fittest
seemed to many a demonstration that victory was to the strongest or to
the swiftest, and that the rest must simply go to the wall or lag
behind in the race of life. The doctrine of the superman seemed to be
the very latest discovery of science, but now, after having fought a
great war to overthrow that doctrine, the world is much readier to go
back and take up the thread of the philosophy of the race before the
theory of the struggle for existence came to figure so largely in it.
We have come to realize that everywhere in nature there is a great law
of mutual aid within its species impressed upon all living things, and
this is even more applicable to the human species than to those of the
lower orders.
{109}
CHAPTER V
FASTING AND ABSTINENCE
Practically all religions have enjoined fasting as a part of their
practice, either as a sacrifice made to higher powers or a recognition
of the fact that occasional voluntary abstinence from food gave man a
power of control over himself which represented a real religious gain
in his relations with the deity. We have heard not a little in modern
times of the evils to health consequent upon the abuse of fasting and
of the limitation of food generally. Appetite must rule the quantity
to be eaten, and this must not be interfered with by religious motives
or health will suffer. Undoubtedly imprudent fasting, like the abuse
of anything else, no matter how good in itself, has done no little
harm. So much has been said, however, of the hysterical and neurotic
conditions which resulted in women particularly, who out of an
exaggerated sense of piety ate less than was necessary to support
their bodies properly, that a rather violent prejudice has been
created in many minds with regard to fasting as if it were an
old-fashioned superstitious practice which our progress in knowledge
and in the proper understanding of man, and his relations to the
higher powers had enabled us to see the foolishness of and do away
with for good and all.
Careful observations made in the course of the advance of modern
scientific medicine have, however, made it {110} very clear that
periodical abstinences from food, or at least certain foods,
especially among people who are accustomed to eat rather heartily,
instead of being in any way a detriment to health, are practically
always a distinct hygienic advantage. Physicians are not likely to
take seriously such expressions as that most people dig their graves
with their teeth or that eating too much is the bane of the race, but
they appreciate very well that there are a great many people,
especially among the better-to-do classes, who eat more than is good
for them. It is just the people who have least exercise and need the
least food who are tempted by the variety and tastiness of modern food
to eat too much. Any practice that would limit this would undoubtedly
be good. Fasting and abstinence, because periodic, would be especially
valuable, for they are likely to do less harm than any continued
limitation of food. The one phase of modern sanitation and hygiene, as
made clear from the mortality records of the departments of health of
our cities, that has been seriously disturbing in recent years, has
been the increase in mortality among people above the age of fifty. We
have been very properly proud of the fact that we have reduced
municipal death rates and made the average length of life much longer
than it used to be. We have done this, however, by saving more young
children and by greatly lessening the infectious diseases among young
adults, but the deaths from apoplexy, Bright's disease and heart
disease, just when life is at its most valuable stage, have increased
and not diminished. The tendencies to these serious degenerative
diseases are due, it is well understood, ever so much more to
overeating than to undereating. This is particularly true as regards
the overeating of meat and other foods {111} rich in proteid materials
which have been the special subject of religious fasting regulation.
Religion then, by inculcating the practice of fasting and abstinence
from flesh meat at certain times, has conferred a great benefit on the
race. One fish day in the week, for instance, all the year round, has
in the minds of a great many physicians given nearly as much rest to
the digestive tract and certain of the more delicate metabolic
processes of the body as Sunday freedom from labor has given to the
mind and the body generally. The fact that a large part of our
population will eat no meat on Friday and must have fish leads to a
commercial provision of fresh fish on that day in the week, of which
practically all the community, including those who feel no religious
obligation in the matter, takes advantage.
Abstinence from meat, however, is quite a different thing from
fasting, and Friday is a day of abstinence and not of fast. The fast
days come at certain periods of the year, as in Advent and Lent, and
certain days which are specially designated. The keeping of Lent,
during which for forty days people are expected to eat one third less
than they have been accustomed to, is a very valuable institution. I
am not one of those who think, that everybody eats too much and who
like to be constantly insisting that people are destroying their lives
by overeating, but I know very well that considerably more than half
of humanity eat more than is good for them. I know, too, that about
one fourth of humanity does not eat enough for its own good, and that
unfortunately a good many of these are taking the warnings with regard
to eating to heart, though those who need them most are neglecting
them. Practically everybody who is overweight is eating too much and
exercising too little. A {112} good many people who are underweight
are eating too little. Considerably more than one half of adult
mankind, however, would be benefited by keeping rather strictly the
regulations for the Lenten season. The fact that the Sundays are not
in Lent and that good, hearty meals can be eaten on that day gives
assurance that people are not likely to be hurt by the fast. I think
that most of the physicians of the world would agree that the great
majority of men and women would be benefited by the rest and change
which their metabolic processes receive as a result of limitation of
eating, and the observance of ecclesiastical regulations as to the
modification of food.
The reduction in meat eating and the production to some extent of a
taste for the white rather than the dark foods generally, for butter
and eggs and creamed vegetables rather than the meat soups and meat
sauces and the dark, heavy meats, so rich in the irritative
extractives, is undoubtedly of distinct hygienic advantage. Of late
years particularly, probably much more meat than is good for people
has been eaten. The better-to-do classes have gradually come to the
fashion of removing the fat, cutting off all the connective tissue
portions of their meat and serving it or eating it in solid muscular
masses, which is neither conducive to good digestion and elimination
nor to the proper building up of the body. Too many irritant materials
are thus consumed, and it is no wonder that that properly dreaded
disease, arterio-sclerosis, the hardening of the arteries,
representing premature lessening of the elasticity of the tubes which
convey the blood on which vital processes depend to so great a degree,
has begun to be much more frequent than it used to be. There is
agreement among physicians that {113} a rich meat diet has much to do
with this and that excessive meat eating is a growing evil in our
time.
Only religion could accomplish a change in this tendency, for there is
an allurement about meat which grows as more of it is taken. This can
be noticed in children very readily, and human habits in civilized
countries have unfortunately followed a direction in this matter that
requires some profound influence to modify them. Not that meat is of
itself a deleterious substance, nor one that should not be eaten, for
there is no reason in nature for vegetarianism; but excess in eating
it, like excess in anything else, may do serious harm. Nature, and
when we use the word we mean nature's God, set an index that is
infallible as to the variety of our diet when we were given cutting
and tearing as well as grinding teeth. The presence of both these
varieties of teeth, though the meat-eating animals have only the
incisors and canines, while the plant-eating animals have only the
molars or grinders, makes it clear beyond all doubt that human beings
were meant to eat meat, but in this, as in everything else, excess
must be avoided, and if it is not serious consequences follow.
A great many are inclined to think of abstinence as representing
abstinence from food alone, but it must not be forgotten that as
understood in connection with religion it represents abstinence from
all the harmful things. For instance, it represents abstinence from
sleep when that is being taken to excess, and as a rule any healthy
human being above the age of twenty and under sixty who sleeps more
than eight hours in the day needs to practice such abstinence. There
is literally such a thing as oversleeping and thus accumulating more
energy than one has use for. The surplus energy is then used up {114}
within the individual to the disturbance of functions of various
kinds. Many a woman who has no children and who lives in an apartment
hotel and has no duties that she has to get up for eats breakfast in
bed, and does not rise until after eleven o'clock, after having gone
to bed the night before sometime around midnight, and then wonders why
she feels so miserable. Nothing would do her more good than to be out
a little after eight in the morning briskly walking somewhere with the
idea of helping some one else. She needs to practice abstinence of a
very definite kind.
Then there are others who abstain too much from exercise. Whenever
they go out they ride either in a troll
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