Part 5
"Excess is not the only thing which breaks men in their health, and in the comfortable enjoyment of themselves; but many are brought into a very ill and languishing habit of body by mere sloth; and sloth is in itself both a great sin, and the cause of many more."
Bishop SOUTH.
"There is no true care for the body which forgets the soul. There is no true care for the soul which is not mindful of the body.... The duty of physical health and the duty of spiritual purity and loftiness are not two duties; they are two parts of one duty,--which is the living of the completest life which it is possible for man to live. And the two parts minister to one another. Be good that you may be well; be well that you may be good. Both of those two injunctions are reasonable, and both are binding on us all."
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
The Duty of Physical Health
MARCH 26
"Moreover, health is not only a great element of happiness, but it is essential to good work. It is not merely wasteful but selfish to throw it away.
"It is impossible to do good work,--at any rate, it is impossible to do our best,--if we overstrain ourselves. It is bad policy, because all work done under such circumstances will inevitably involve an additional period of quiet and rest afterwards; but apart from this, work so done will not be of a high quality, it will show traces of irritability and weakness: the judgment will not be good: if it involves co-operation with others there will be great possibility of friction and misunderstandings."
Lord AVEBURY.
"When we are out of sorts things get on our nerves, the most trifling annoyances assume the proportions of a catastrophe. It is a sure sign that we need rest and fresh air."
Lord AVEBURY.
"O Almighty and most merciful God, of Thy bountiful goodness keep us, we beseech Thee, from all things that may hurt us; that we, being ready both in body and soul, may cheerfully accomplish those things that Thou wouldest have done; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."
_The Book of Common Prayer._
Physical Morality
MARCH 27
"The preservation of health is a _duty_. Few men seem conscious that there is such a thing as physical morality. Men's habitual words and acts imply the idea that they are at liberty to treat their bodies as they please. Disorders entailed by disobedience to Nature's dictates they regard simply as grievances, not as the effects of a conduct more or less flagitious. Though the evil consequences inflicted on their dependants, and on future generations, are often as great as those caused by crime, yet they do not think themselves in any degree criminal. It is true that in the case of drunkenness the viciousness of this bodily transgression is recognised, but none appear to infer that if this bodily transgression is vicious, so, too, is every bodily transgression. The fact is that all breaches of the laws of health are _physical sins_."
HERBERT SPENCER.
"... Health is not merely a matter of the body. 'Anger, hatred, grief, and fear are among the influences most destructive of vitality.' And, on the other hand, cheerfulness, good-humour, and peace of mind are powerful elements of health."
Lord AVEBURY.
Invalids
MARCH 28
"If you are an invalid, do your best to get well; but, if you must remain an invalid, still strive for the unselfishness and serenity which are the best possessions of health. There are no sublimer victories than some that are won on sick-beds."
"We have sometimes known some men or women, helpless so that their lives seemed to be all dependent, who yet, through their sickness, had so mounted to a higher life and so identified themselves with Christ that those on whom they rested found the Christ in them and rested upon it. Their sick-rooms became churches. Their weak voices spoke gospels. The hands they seemed to clasp were really clasping theirs. They were depended on while they seemed to be most dependent. And when they died, when the faint flicker of their life went out, strong men whose light seemed radiant found themselves walking in the darkness; and stout hearts, on which theirs used to lean, trembled as if the staff and substance of their strength was gone."
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
"Pain is no evil unless it conquers us."
GEORGE ELIOT.
Invalids
MARCH 29
"It may be that God used to give you plentiful chances to work for Him. Your days went singing by, each winged with some enthusiastic duty for the Master whom you loved.... You can be idle for Him, if so He wills, with the same joy with which you once laboured for Him. The sick-bed or the prison is as welcome as the harvest-field or the battle-field, when once your soul has come to value as the end of life the privilege of seeking and of finding Him."
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
"To be well enough to work is the wish of my natural heart; but if that may not be, I know that 'they also serve who only stand and wait.' God will not require healthy men's labour from you or me; and if we are poor in power and opportunity to serve Him, our widow's mite will weigh against the gold ingots of His chosen apostles."
_Memoir of George Wilson._
"The widow's mite? Well, when they laughed at S. Theresa because she wanted to build a great orphanage and had only three ducats to begin with, she answered, 'With three ducats Theresa can do nothing, but with God and her three ducats there is nothing which Theresa cannot do.'"
F. W. FARRAR.
Lessons of Suffering
MARCH 30
"To have suffered much is like knowing many languages. You have learnt to understand all, and to make yourself intelligible to all."
"We have all met some great sufferers, whose cheerfulness and good-humour are not only a lesson to us who enjoy good health, but who seem to be, as it were, raised and consecrated by a life of suffering."
Lord AVEBURY.
"What man goes worthily through sorrow and does not come out hating shams and pretences, hungering for truth; and also full of sympathy for his fellow-man whose capacity for suffering has been revealed to him by his own?"
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
Hypochondriacs
MARCH 31--APRIL 1
"There is a temperament called _Hypochondriac_, to which many persons, some of them the brightest, the most interesting, the most gifted, are born heirs,--a want of balance of the nervous powers, which tends constantly to periods of high excitement and of consequent depression,--an unfortunate inheritance for the possessor, though accompanied often with the greatest talents....
"People of this temperament are subject to fits of gloom and despondency, of nervous irritability and suffering, which darken the aspect of the whole world to them, which present lying reports of their friends, of themselves, of the circumstances of their life, and of all with which they have to do.
"Now the highest philosophy for persons thus afflicted is to understand themselves and their tendencies, to know that these fits of gloom and depression are just as much a form of disease as a fever or a toothache,--to know that it is the peculiarity of the disease to fill the mind with wretched illusions, to make them seem miserable and unlovely to themselves, to make their nearest friends seem unjust and unkind, to make all events appear to be going wrong and tending to destruction and ruin.
"The evils and burdens of such a temperament are half removed when a man once knows that he has it, and recognises it for a disease,--when he does not trust himself to speak and act in those bitter hours as if there were any truth in what he thinks and feels and sees. He who has not attained to this wisdom overwhelms his friends and his family with the waters of bitterness; he stings with unjust accusations, and makes his fireside dreadful with fancies which are real to him, but false as the ravings of fever.
"A sensible person, thus diseased, who has found out what ails him, will shut his mouth resolutely, not to give utterance to the dark thoughts that infest his soul.
"A lady of great brilliancy and wit, who was subject to these periods, once said to me, 'My dear sir, there are times when I know I am possessed of the Devil, and then I never let myself speak.' And so this wise woman carried her burden about with her in a determined, cheerful reticence, leaving always the impression of a cheery, kindly temper, when, if she had spoken out a tithe of what she thought and felt in her morbid hours, she would have driven all her friends from her, and made others as miserable as she was herself. She was a sunbeam, a life-giving presence in every family, by the power of self-knowledge and self-control."
_Little Foxes_, HARRIET BEECHER STOWE.
"Comfort's Art"
APRIL 2
"It would be very petty of us who are well and can bear things, to think much of small offences from those who carry a weight of trial."
GEORGE ELIOT.
"Trouble is so hard to bear, is it not? How can we live and think that any one has trouble--piercing trouble--and we could help them and never try?"
GEORGE ELIOT.
"Pity makes the world soft to the weak and noble for the strong."
_The Light of Asia_, E. ARNOLD.
"Ask God to give thee skill For comfort's art, That thou may'st consecrated be, And set apart Unto a life of sympathy! For heavy is the weight of ill For every heart, And comforters are needed much Of Christlike touch."
Irritability
APRIL 3
"Irritability is, more than most unlovely states, a sin of the flesh. It is not, like envy, malice, spite, revenge, a vice which we may suppose to belong equally to an embodied or a disembodied spirit: in fact, it comes nearer to being physical depravity than anything I know of. There are some bodily states, some conditions of the nerves, such that we could not conceive of even an angelic spirit, confined in a body thus disordered, as being able to do any more than simply endure. It is a state of nervous torture; and the attacks which the wretched victim makes on others are as much a result of disease as the snapping and biting of a patient convulsed with hydrophobia.... I think it is undeniable that the peace and happiness of the home-circle are very generally much invaded by the recurrence in its members of these states of bodily irritability. Every person, if he thinks the matter over, will see that his condition in life, the character of his friends, his estimate of their virtues and failings, his hopes and expectations, are all very much modified by these things. Cannot we all remember going to bed as very ill-used, persecuted individuals, all whose friends were unreasonable, whose life was full of trials and crosses, and waking up on a bright bird-singing morning to find all these illusions gone with the fogs of the night? Our friends are nice people, after all; the little things that annoyed us look ridiculous by bright sunshine; and we are fortunate individuals."
_Little Foxes_, HARRIET BEECHER STOWE.
Irritability
APRIL 4
"The philosophy of life, then, as far as this matter is concerned, must consist of two things: first, to keep ourselves out of irritable bodily states; and, second, to understand and control these states, when we cannot ward them off. Of course, the first of these is the most important; and yet, of all things, it seems to be least looked into and understood. We find abundant rules for the government of the tongue and temper; it is a slough into which, John Bunyan hath it, cartloads of wholesome instructions have been thrown; but how to get and keep that healthy state of brain, stomach, and nerves which takes away the temptation to ill-temper and anger is a subject which moral and religious teachers seem scarcely to touch upon.... We have a common saying, that this or that person is soon used up. Now most nervous, irritable states of temper are the mere physical result of a used-up condition. The person has overspent his nervous energy,--like a man who should eat up on Monday the whole food which was to keep him for a week, and go growling and faint through the other days; or the quantity of nervous force which was wanted to carry on the whole system in all its parts is seized on by some one monopolising portion, and used up to the loss and detriment of the rest."
_Little Foxes_, HARRIET BEECHER STOWE.
Accidie
APRIL 5
"... 'Accidie,' the spiritual sloth, which we rechristen 'depression' and 'low spirits,' and meet with sympathy! Dante met it by fixing its victims in the mire beneath the water, where they keep gurgling in their throats the confession--
'We sullen were In the sweet air, which by the sun is gladdened, Bearing within ourselves the sluggish reek; Now we are sullen in this sable mire.'"
_Stray Thoughts on Reading_, LUCY SOULSBY.
"A dull day need not be a depressing day; depression always implies physical or moral weakness, and is therefore never to be tolerated so long as one can struggle against it."
HAMILTON W. MABIE.
Accidie
APRIL 6
"... The sin of accidie, which is 'a sorrowfulness so weighing down the mind that there is no good it likes to do. It has attached to it as its inseparable comrade a distress and weariness of soul, and a sluggishness in all good works, which plunges the whole man into lazy languor, and works in him a constant bitterness. And out of this vehement woe springs silence and a flagging of the voice, because the soul is so absorbed and taken up with its own indolent dejection, that it has no energy for utterance, but is cramped, and hampered, and imprisoned in its own confused bewilderment, and has not a word to say.'"
_The Spirit of Discipline_, Bishop PAGET.
"Try it for a day, I beseech you, to preserve yourself in an easy and cheerful frame of mind. Compare the day in which you have rooted out the weed of dissatisfaction with that on which you have allowed it to grow up, and you will find your heart open to every good motive, your life strengthened and your breast armed with a panoply against every trick of fate; truly, you will wonder at your own improvement."
RICHTER.
Accidie
APRIL 7
"As one compares the various estimates of the sin, one can mark three main elements which help to make it what it is--elements which can be distinguished, though in experience, I think, they almost always tend to meet and mingle; they are _gloom_ and _sloth_ and _irritation_."
_The Spirit of Discipline_, Bishop PAGET.
"You find yourself refreshed by the presence of cheerful people. Why not make earnest effort to confer that pleasure on others? You will find half the battle is gained if you never allow yourself to say anything gloomy."
LYDIA MARIA CHILDS.
"Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness; altogether past calculation its power of endurance."
CARLYLE.
Accidie
APRIL 8
"'It is a mood which severs a man from thoughts of God, and suffers him not to be calm and kindly to his brethren. Sometimes, without any provoking cause, we are suddenly depressed by so great sorrowfulness, that we cannot greet with wonted courtesy the coming even of those who are dear and near to us, and all they say in conversation, however appropriate it may be, we think annoying and unnecessary, and have no pleasant answer for it, because the gall of bitterness fills all the recesses of our soul.' Those who are sad after this fashion have, as St. Gregory says, anger already close to them; for from sadness such as this come forth (as he says in another place) malice, grudging, faint-heartedness, despair, torpor as to that which is commanded, and the straying of the mind after that which is forbidden."
_The Spirit of Discipline_, Bishop PAGET.
"Activity is the antidote to the depressions that lower our vitality, whether they come from physical or psychical causes."
Accidie
APRIL 9
"We may be somewhat surprised when we discover how precisely Pascal, or Shakspeare, or Montaigne, can put his finger on our weak point, or tell us the truth about some moral lameness or disorder of which we, perhaps, were beginning to accept a more lenient and comfortable diagnosis. But when a poet, controversialist and preacher of the Eastern Church, under the dominion of the Saracens, or an anchoret of Egypt, an Abbot of Gaul, in the sixth century, tells us, in the midst of our letters, and railway journeys, and magazines, and movements, exactly what it is that on some days makes us so singularly unpleasant to ourselves and to others--tells us in effect that it is not simply the east wind, or dyspepsia, or overwork, or the contrariness of things in general, but that it is a certain subtle and complex trouble of our own hearts, which we perhaps have never had the patience or the frankness to see as it really is; that he knew it quite well, only too well for his own happiness and peace, and that he can put us in a good way of dealing with it--the very strangeness of the intrusion from such a quarter into our most private affairs may secure for him a certain degree of our interest and attention."
_The Spirit of Discipline_, Bishop PAGET.
Accidie
APRIL 10
"And now, as ever, over against Accidie rises the great grace of Fortitude; the grace that makes men undertake hard things by their own will wisely and reasonably. There is something in the very name of Fortitude which speaks to the almost indelible love of heroism in men's hearts; but perhaps the truest Fortitude may often be a less heroic, a more tame and business-like affair than we are apt to think. It may be exercised chiefly in doing very little things, whose whole value lies in this, that, if one did not hope in God, one would not do them; in secretly dispelling moods which one would like to show; in saying nothing about one's lesser troubles and vexations; in seeing whether it may not be best to bear a burden before one tries to see whither one can shift it; in refusing for one's self excuses which one would not refuse for others. These, anyhow, are ways in which a man may every day be strengthening himself in the discipline of Fortitude; and then, if greater things are asked of him, he is not very likely to draw back from them. And while he waits the asking of these greater things, he may be gaining from the love of God a hidden strength and glory such as he himself would least of all suspect; he may be growing in the patience and perseverance of the saints. For most of us the chief temptation to lose heart, the chief demand upon our strength, comes in the monotony of our failures, and in the tedious persistence of prosaic difficulties; it is the distance, not the pace, that tries us. To go on choosing what has but a look of being the more excellent way, pushing on towards a faintly glimmering light, and never doubting the supreme worth of goodness even in its least brilliant fragments,--this is the normal task of many lives; in this men show what they are like. And for this we need a quiet and sober Fortitude, somewhat like that which Botticelli painted, and Mr. Ruskin has described."
_The Spirit of Discipline_, Bishop PAGET.
Temper
APRIL 11
"What is temper? Its primary meaning, the proportion and mode in which qualities are mingled, is much neglected in popular speech, yet even here the word often carries a reference to an habitual state or general tendency of the organism in distinction from what are held to be specific virtues and vices. As people confess to bad memory without expecting to sink in mental reputation, so we hear a man declared to have a bad temper and yet glorified as the possessor of every high quality. When he errs or in any way commits himself, his temper is accused, not his character, and it is understood that but for a brutal bearish mood he is kindness itself. If he kicks small animals, swears violently at a servant who mistakes orders, or is grossly rude to his wife, it is remarked apologetically that these things mean nothing--they are all temper.
"Certainly there is a limit to this form of apology; and the forgery of a bill, or the ordering of goods without any prospect of paying for them, has never been set down to an unfortunate habit of sulkiness or of irascibility. But on the whole there is a peculiar exercise of indulgence towards the manifestations of bad temper which tends to encourage them, so that we are in danger of having among us a number of virtuous persons who conduct themselves detestably, just as we have hysterical patients who, with sound organs, are apparently labouring under many sorts of organic disease. Let it be admitted, however, that a man may be a 'good fellow' and yet have a bad temper, so bad that we recognise his merits with reluctance, and are inclined to resent his occasionally amiable behaviour as an unfair demand on our admiration."
GEORGE ELIOT.
Temper
APRIL 12
"Jealousy, anger, pride, uncharity, cruelty, self-righteousness, sulkiness, touchiness, doggedness,--these are the staple ingredients of Ill-Temper. And yet men laugh over it. 'Only temper,' they call it: a little hot-headedness, a momentary ruffling of the surface, a mere passing cloud. But the passing cloud is composed of drops, and the drops here betoken an ocean, foul and rancorous, seething somewhere within the life--an ocean made up of jealousy, anger, pride, uncharity, cruelty, self-righteousness, sulkiness, touchiness, doggedness, lashed into a raging storm.
"This is why temper is significant. It is not in what it is that its significance lies, but in what it reveals. But for this it were not worth notice. It is the intermittent fever which tells of un-intermittent disease; the occasional bubble escaping to the surface, betraying the rottenness underneath; a hastily prepared specimen of the hidden products of the soul, dropped involuntarily when you are off your guard. In one word, it is the lightning-form of a dozen hideous and unchristian sins."
_The Ideal Life_, HENRY DRUMMOND.
"Whenever you are angry, be assured that it is not only a present evil, but that you have increased a habit."
EPICTETUS.
Temper
APRIL 13
"Certainly if a bad-tempered man can be admirably virtuous, he must be so under extreme difficulties. I doubt the possibility that a high order of character can co-exist with a temper like Touchwood's. For it is of the nature of such temper to interrupt the formation of healthy mental habits, which depend on a growing harmony between perception, conviction, and impulse. There may be good feelings, good deeds--for a human nature may pack endless varieties and blessed inconsistencies in its windings--but it is essential to what is worthy to be called high character, that it may be safely calculated on, and that its qualities shall have taken the form of principles or laws habitually, if not perfectly, obeyed. If a man frequently passes unjust judgments, takes up false attitudes, intermits his acts of kindness with rude behaviour or cruel words, and falls into the consequent vulgar error of supposing that he can make amends by laboured agreeableness, I cannot consider such courses any the less ugly because they are ascribed to 'temper.' Especially I object to the assumption that his having a fundamentally good disposition is either an apology or a compensation for his bad behaviour."
GEORGE ELIOT.
Temper
APRIL 14
"Consider how much more often you suffer from your anger and grief, than from those very things for which you are angry and grieved."
MARCUS AURELIUS.
"The _difficult_ part of good temper consists in forbearance, and accommodation to the ill-humour of others."
EMPSON.
"Do we not know that the storm of feeling can be checked, if only we can prevent the first word from being spoken, the first gesture from being made. And is it not matter of common observation that persons who begin by being Stoics in demeanour end by becoming Stoics in reality?"
_The Making of Character_, Professor MACCUNN.
Temper
APRIL 15