I wish in the following hour to take certain psychological doctrines and
show their practical applications to mental hygiene,--to the hygiene of
our American life more particularly. Our people, especially in academic
circles, are turning towards psychology nowadays with great
expectations; and, if psychology is to justify them, it must be by
showing fruits in the pedagogic and therapeutic lines.
The reader may possibly have heard of a peculiar theory of the emotions,
commonly referred to in psychological literature as the Lange-James
theory. According to this theory, our emotions are mainly due to those
organic stirrings that are aroused in us in a reflex way by the stimulus
of the exciting object or situation. An emotion of fear, for example, or
surprise, is not a direct effect of the object's presence on the mind,
but an effect of that still earlier effect, the bodily commotion which
the object suddenly excites; so that, were this bodily commotion
suppressed, we should not so much _feel_ fear as call the situation
fearful; we should not feel surprise, but coldly recognize that the
object was indeed astonishing. One enthusiast has even gone so far as to
say that when we feel sorry it is because we weep, when we feel afraid
it is because we run away, and not conversely. Some of you may perhaps
be acquainted with the paradoxical formula. Now, whatever exaggeration
may possibly lurk in this account of our emotions (and I doubt myself
whether the exaggeration be very great), it is certain that the main
core of it is true, and that the mere giving way to tears, for example,
or to the outward expression of an anger-fit, will result for the moment
in making the inner grief or anger more acutely felt. There is,
accordingly, no better known or more generally useful precept in the
moral training of youth, or in one's personal self-discipline, than that
which bids us pay primary attention to what we do and express, and not
to care too much for what we feel. If we only check a cowardly impulse
in time, for example, or if we only _don't_ strike the blow or rip out
with the complaining or insulting word that we shall regret as long as
we live, our feelings themselves will presently be the calmer and
better, with no particular guidance from us on their own account. Action
seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and
by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the
will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.
Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous
cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully,
and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such
conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that
occasion can. So to feel brave, act as if we _were_ brave, use all our
will to that end, and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of
fear. Again, in order to feel kindly toward a person to whom we have
been inimical, the only way is more or less deliberately to smile, to
make sympathetic inquiries, and to force ourselves to say genial things.
One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of
heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental
demon of uncharitable feeling. To wrestle with a bad feeling only pins
our attention on it, and keeps it still fastened in the mind: whereas,
if we act as if from some better feeling, the old bad feeling soon
folds its tent like an Arab, and silently steals away.
The best manuals of religious devotion accordingly reiterate the maxim
that we must let our feelings go, and pay no regard to them whatever. In
an admirable and widely successful little book called 'The Christian's
Secret of a Happy Life,' by Mrs. Hannah Whitall Smith, I find this
lesson on almost every page. _Act_ faithfully, and you really have
faith, no matter how cold and even how dubious you may feel. "It is your
purpose God looks at," writes Mrs. Smith, "not your feelings about that
purpose; and your purpose, or will, is therefore the only thing you need
attend to.... Let your emotions come or let them go, just as God
pleases, and make no account of them either way.... They really have
nothing to do with the matter. They are not the indicators of your
spiritual state, but are merely the indicators of your temperament or of
your present physical condition."
But you all know these facts already, so I need no longer press them on
your attention. From our acts and from our attitudes ceaseless inpouring
currents of sensation come, which help to determine from moment to
moment what our inner states shall be: that is a fundamental law of
psychology which I will therefore proceed to assume.
* * * * *
A Viennese neurologist of considerable reputation has recently written
about the _Binnenleben_, as he terms it, or buried life of human beings.
No doctor, this writer says, can get into really profitable relations
with a nervous patient until he gets some sense of what the patient's
_Binnenleben_ is, of the sort of unuttered inner atmosphere in which his
consciousness dwells alone with the secrets of its prison-house. This
inner personal tone is what we can't communicate or describe
articulately to others; but the wraith and ghost of it, so to speak, are
often what our friends and intimates feel as our most characteristic
quality. In the unhealthy-minded, apart from all sorts of old regrets,
ambitions checked by shames and aspirations obstructed by timidities, it
consists mainly of bodily discomforts not distinctly localized by the
sufferer, but breeding a general self-mistrust and sense that things are
not as they should be with him. Half the thirst for alcohol that exists
in the world exists simply because alcohol acts as a temporary
anæsthetic and effacer to all these morbid feelings that never ought to
be in a human being at all. In the healthy-minded, on the contrary,
there are no fears or shames to discover; and the sensations that pour
in from the organism only help to swell the general vital sense of
security and readiness for anything that may turn up.
Consider, for example, the effects of a well-toned _motor-apparatus_,
nervous and muscular, on our general personal self-consciousness, the
sense of elasticity and efficiency that results. They tell us that in
Norway the life of the women has lately been entirely revolutionized by
the new order of muscular feelings with which the use of the _ski_, or
long snow-shoes, as a sport for both sexes, has made the women
acquainted. Fifteen years ago the Norwegian women were even more than
the women of other lands votaries of the old-fashioned ideal of
femininity, 'the domestic angel,' the 'gentle and refining influence'
sort of thing. Now these sedentary fireside tabby-cats of Norway have
been trained, they say, by the snow-shoes into lithe and audacious
creatures, for whom no night is too dark or height too giddy, and who
are not only saying good-bye to the traditional feminine pallor and
delicacy of constitution, but actually taking the lead in every
educational and social reform. I cannot but think that the tennis and
tramping and skating habits and the bicycle-craze which are so rapidly
extending among our dear sisters and daughters in this country are going
also to lead to a sounder and heartier moral tone, which will send its
tonic breath through all our American life.
I hope that here in America more and more the ideal of the well-trained
and vigorous body will be maintained neck by neck with that of the
well-trained and vigorous mind as the two coequal halves of the higher
education for men and women alike. The strength of the British Empire
lies in the strength of character of the individual Englishman, taken
all alone by himself. And that strength, I am persuaded, is perennially
nourished and kept up by nothing so much as by the national worship, in
which all classes meet, of athletic outdoor life and sport.
I recollect, years ago, reading a certain work by an American doctor on
hygiene and the laws of life and the type of future humanity. I have
forgotten its author's name and its title, but I remember well an awful
prophecy that it contained about the future of our muscular system.
Human perfection, the writer said, means ability to cope with the
environment; but the environment will more and more require mental power
from us, and less and less will ask for bare brute strength. Wars will
cease, machines will do all our heavy work, man will become more and
more a mere director of nature's energies, and less and less an exerter
of energy on his own account. So that, if the _homo sapiens_ of the
future can only digest his food and think, what need will he have of
well-developed muscles at all? And why, pursued this writer, should we
not even now be satisfied with a more delicate and intellectual type of
beauty than that which pleased our ancestors? Nay, I have heard a
fanciful friend make a still further advance in this 'new-man'
direction. With our future food, he says, itself prepared in liquid form
from the chemical elements of the atmosphere, pepsinated or
half-digested in advance, and sucked up through a glass tube from a tin
can, what need shall we have of teeth, or stomachs even? They may go,
along with our muscles and our physical courage, while, challenging ever
more and more our proper admiration, will grow the gigantic domes of our
crania, arching over our spectacled eyes, and animating our flexible
little lips to those floods of learned and ingenious talk which will
constitute our most congenial occupation.
I am sure that your flesh creeps at this apocalyptic vision. Mine
certainly did so; and I cannot believe that our muscular vigor will ever
be a superfluity. Even if the day ever dawns in which it will not be
needed for fighting the old heavy battles against Nature, it will still
always be needed to furnish the background of sanity, serenity, and
cheerfulness to life, to give moral elasticity to our disposition, to
round off the wiry edge of our fretfulness, and make us good-humored and
easy of approach. Weakness is too apt to be what the doctors call
irritable weakness. And that blessed internal peace and confidence, that
_acquiescentia in seipso_, as Spinoza used to call it, that wells up
from every part of the body of a muscularly well-trained human being,
and soaks the indwelling soul of him with satisfaction, is, quite apart
from every consideration of its mechanical utility, an element of
spiritual hygiene of supreme significance.
And now let me go a step deeper into mental hygiene, and try to enlist
your insight and sympathy in a cause which I believe is one of paramount
patriotic importance to us Yankees. Many years ago a Scottish medical
man, Dr. Clouston, a mad-doctor as they call him there, or what we
should call an asylum physician (the most eminent one in Scotland),
visited this country, and said something that has remained in my memory
ever since. "You Americans," he said, "wear too much expression on your
faces. You are living like an army with all its reserves engaged in
action. The duller countenances of the British population betoken a
better scheme of life. They suggest stores of reserved nervous force to
fall back upon, if any occasion should arise that requires it. This
inexcitability, this presence at all times of power not used, I regard,"
continued Dr. Clouston, "as the great safeguard of our British people.
The other thing in you gives me a sense of insecurity, and you ought
somehow to tone yourselves down. You really do carry too much
expression, you take too intensely the trivial moments of life."
Now Dr. Clouston is a trained reader of the secrets of the soul as
expressed upon the countenance, and the observation of his which I quote
seems to me to mean a great deal. And all Americans who stay in Europe
long enough to get accustomed to the spirit that reigns and expresses
itself there, so unexcitable as compared with ours, make a similar
observation when they return to their native shores. They find a
wild-eyed look upon their compatriots' faces, either of too desperate
eagerness and anxiety or of too intense responsiveness and good-will. It
is hard to say whether the men or the women show it most. It is true
that we do not all feel about it as Dr. Clouston felt. Many of us, far
from deploring it, admire it. We say: "What intelligence it shows! How
different from the stolid cheeks, the codfish eyes, the slow, inanimate
demeanor we have been seeing in the British Isles!" Intensity, rapidity,
vivacity of appearance, are indeed with us something of a nationally
accepted ideal; and the medical notion of 'irritable weakness' is not
the first thing suggested by them to our mind, as it was to Dr.
Clouston's. In a weekly paper not very long ago I remember reading a
story in which, after describing the beauty and interest of the
heroine's personality, the author summed up her charms by saying that to
all who looked upon her an impression as of 'bottled lightning' was
irresistibly conveyed.
Bottled lightning, in truth, is one of our American ideals, even of a
young girl's character! Now it is most ungracious, and it may seem to
some persons unpatriotic, to criticise in public the physical
peculiarities of one's own people, of one's own family, so to speak.
Besides, it may be said, and said with justice, that there are plenty of
bottled-lightning temperaments in other countries, and plenty of
phlegmatic temperaments here; and that, when all is said and done, the
more or less of tension about which I am making such a fuss is a very
small item in the sum total of a nation's life, and not worth solemn
treatment at a time when agreeable rather than disagreeable things
should be talked about. Well, in one sense the more or less of tension
in our faces and in our unused muscles is a small thing: not much
mechanical work is done by these contractions. But it is not always the
material size of a thing that measures its importance: often it is its
place and function. One of the most philosophical remarks I ever heard
made was by an unlettered workman who was doing some repairs at my house
many years ago. "There is very little difference between one man and
another," he said, "when you go to the bottom of it. But what little
there is, is very important." And the remark certainly applies to this
case. The general over-contraction may be small when estimated in
foot-pounds, but its importance is immense on account of its _effects on
the over-contracted person's spiritual life_. This follows as a
necessary consequence from the theory of our emotions to which I made
reference at the beginning of this article. For by the sensations that
so incessantly pour in from the over-tense excited body the over-tense
and excited habit of mind is kept up; and the sultry, threatening,
exhausting, thunderous inner atmosphere never quite clears away. If you
never wholly give yourself up to the chair you sit in, but always keep
your leg- and body-muscles half contracted for a rise; if you breathe
eighteen or nineteen instead of sixteen times a minute, and never quite
breathe out at that,--what mental mood _can_ you be in but one of inner
panting and expectancy, and how can the future and its worries possibly
forsake your mind? On the other hand, how can they gain admission to
your mind if your brow be unruffled, your respiration calm and complete,
and your muscles all relaxed?
Now what is the cause of this absence of repose, this bottled-lightning
quality in us Americans? The explanation of it that is usually given is
that it comes from the extreme dryness of our climate and the acrobatic
performances of our thermometer, coupled with the extraordinary
progressiveness of our life, the hard work, the railroad speed, the
rapid success, and all the other things we know so well by heart. Well,
our climate is certainly exciting, but hardly more so than that of many
parts of Europe, where nevertheless no bottled-lightning girls are
found. And the work done and the pace of life are as extreme an every
great capital of Europe as they are here. To me both of these pretended
causes are utterly insufficient to explain the facts.
To explain them, we must go not to physical geography, but to psychology
and sociology. The latest chapter both in sociology and in psychology to
be developed in a manner that approaches adequacy is the chapter on the
imitative impulse. First Bagehot, then Tarde, then Royce and Baldwin
here, have shown that invention and imitation, taken together, form, one
may say, the entire warp and woof of human life, in so far as it is
social. The American over-tension and jerkiness and breathlessness and
intensity and agony of expression are primarily social, and only
secondarily physiological, phenomena. They are _bad habits_, nothing
more or less, bred of custom and example, born of the imitation of bad
models and the cultivation of false personal ideals. How are idioms
acquired, how do local peculiarities of phrase and accent come about?
Through an accidental example set by some one, which struck the ears of
others, and was quoted and copied till at last every one in the locality
chimed in. Just so it is with national tricks of vocalization or
intonation, with national manners, fashions of movement and gesture, and
habitual expressions of face. We, here in America, through following a
succession of pattern-setters whom it is now impossible to trace, and
through influencing each other in a bad direction, have at last settled
down collectively into what, for better or worse, is our own
characteristic national type,--a type with the production of which, so
far as these habits go, the climate and conditions have had practically
nothing at all to do.
This type, which we have thus reached by our imitativeness, we now have
fixed upon us, for better or worse. Now no type can be _wholly_
disadvantageous; but, so far as our type follows the bottled-lightning
fashion, it cannot be wholly good. Dr. Clouston was certainly right in
thinking that eagerness, breathlessness, and anxiety are not signs of
strength: they are signs of weakness and of bad co-ordination. The even
forehead, the slab-like cheek, the codfish eye, may be less interesting
for the moment; but they are more promising signs than intense
expression is of what we may expect of their possessor in the long run.
Your dull, unhurried worker gets over a great deal of ground, because he
never goes backward or breaks down. Your intense, convulsive worker
breaks down and has bad moods so often that you never know where he may
be when you most need his help,--he may be having one of his 'bad days.'
We say that so many of our fellow-countrymen collapse, and have to be
sent abroad to rest their nerves, because they work so hard. I suspect
that this is an immense mistake. I suspect that neither the nature nor
the amount of our work is accountable for the frequency and severity of
our breakdowns, but that their cause lies rather in those absurd
feelings of hurry and having no time, in that breathlessness and
tension, that anxiety of feature and that solicitude for results, that
lack of inner harmony and ease, in short, by which with us the work is
so apt to be accompanied, and from which a European who should do the
same work would nine times out of ten be free. These perfectly wanton
and unnecessary tricks of inner attitude and outer manner in us, caught
from the social atmosphere, kept up by tradition, and idealized by many
as the admirable way of life, are the last straws that break the
American camel's back, the final overflowers of our measure of wear and
tear and fatigue.
The voice, for example, in a surprisingly large number of us has a tired
and plaintive sound. Some of us are really tired (for I do not mean
absolutely to deny that our climate has a tiring quality); but far more
of us are not tired at all, or would not be tired at all unless we had
got into a wretched trick of feeling tired, by following the prevalent
habits of vocalization and expression. And if talking high and tired,
and living excitedly and hurriedly, would only enable us to _do_ more by
the way, even while breaking us down in the end, it would be different.
There would be some compensation, some excuse, for going on so. But the
exact reverse is the case. It is your relaxed and easy worker, who is in
no hurry, and quite thoughtless most of the while of consequences, who
is your efficient worker; and tension and anxiety, and present and
future, all mixed up together in our mind at once, are the surest drags
upon steady progress and hindrances to our success. My colleague,
Professor Münsterberg, an excellent observer, who came here recently,
has written some notes on America to German papers. He says in substance
that the appearance of unusual energy in America is superficial and
illusory, being really due to nothing but the habits of jerkiness and
bad co-ordination for which we have to thank the defective training of
our people. I think myself that it is high time for old legends and
traditional opinions to be changed; and that, if any one should begin to
write about Yankee inefficiency and feebleness, and inability to do
anything with time except to waste it, he would have a very pretty
paradoxical little thesis to sustain, with a great many facts to quote,
and a great deal of experience to appeal to in its proof.
Well, my friends, if our dear American character is weakened by all this
over-tension,--and I think, whatever reserves you may make, that you
will agree as to the main facts,--where does the remedy lie? It lies, of
course, where lay the origins of the disease. If a vicious fashion and
taste are to blame for the thing, the fashion and taste must be changed.
And, though it is no small thing to inoculate seventy millions of people
with new standards, yet, if there is to be any relief, that will have
to be done. We must change ourselves from a race that admires jerk and
snap for their own sakes, and looks down upon low voices and quiet ways
as dull, to one that, on the contrary, has calm for its ideal, and for
their own sakes loves harmony, dignity, and ease.
So we go back to the psychology of imitation again. There is only one
way to improve ourselves, and that is by some of us setting an example
which the others may pick up and imitate till the new fashion spreads
from east to west. Some of us are in more favorable positions than
others to set new fashions. Some are much more striking personally and
imitable, so to speak. But no living person is sunk so low as not to be
imitated by somebody. Thackeray somewhere says of the Irish nation that
there never was an Irishman so poor that he didn't have a still poorer
Irishman living at his expense; and, surely, there is no human being
whose example doesn't work contagiously in _some_ particular. The very
idiots at our public institutions imitate each other's peculiarities.
And, if you should individually achieve calmness and harmony in your own
person, you may depend upon it that a wave of imitation will spread
from you, as surely as the circles spread outward when a stone is
dropped into a lake.
Fortunately, we shall not have to be absolute pioneers. Even now in New
York they have formed a society for the improvement of our national
vocalization, and one perceives its machinations already in the shape of
various newspaper paragraphs intended to stir up dissatisfaction with
the awful thing that it is. And, better still than that, because more
radical and general, is the gospel of relaxation, as one may call it,
preached by Miss Annie Payson Call, of Boston, in her admirable little
volume called 'Power through Repose,' a book that ought to be in the
hands of every teacher and student in America of either sex. You need
only be followers, then, on a path already opened up by others. But of
one thing be confident: others still will follow you.
And this brings me to one more application of psychology to practical
life, to which I will call attention briefly, and then close. If one's
example of easy and calm ways is to be effectively contagious, one feels
by instinct that the less voluntarily one aims at getting imitated, the
more unconscious one keeps in the matter, the more likely one is to
succeed. _Become the imitable thing_, and you may then discharge your
minds of all responsibility for the imitation. The laws of social nature
will take care of that result. Now the psychological principle on which
this precept reposes is a law of very deep and wide-spread importance in
the conduct of our lives, and at the same time a law which we Americans
most grievously neglect. Stated technically, the law is this: that
_strong feeling about one's self tends to arrest the free association of
one's objective ideas and motor processes_. We get the extreme example
of this in the mental disease called melancholia.
A melancholic patient is filled through and through with intensely
painful emotion about himself. He is threatened, he is guilty, he is
doomed, he is annihilated, he is lost. His mind is fixed as if in a
cramp on these feelings of his own situation, and in all the books on
insanity you may read that the usual varied flow of his thoughts has
ceased. His associative processes, to use the technical phrase, are
inhibited; and his ideas stand stock-still, shut up to their one
monotonous function of reiterating inwardly the fact of the man's
desperate estate. And this inhibitive influence is not due to the mere
fact that his emotion is _painful_. Joyous emotions about the self also
stop the association of our ideas. A saint in ecstasy is as motionless
and irresponsive and one-idea'd as a melancholiac. And, without going as
far as ecstatic saints, we know how in every one a great or sudden
pleasure may paralyze the flow of thought. Ask young people returning
from a party or a spectacle, and all excited about it, what it was. "Oh,
it was _fine_! it was _fine_! it was _fine_!" is all the information you
are likely to receive until the excitement has calmed down. Probably
every one of my hearers has been made temporarily half-idiotic by some
great success or piece of good fortune. "_Good_! GOOD! GOOD!" is all we
can at such times say to ourselves until we smile at our own very
foolishness.
Now from all this we can draw an extremely practical conclusion. If,
namely, we wish our trains of ideation and volition to be copious and
varied and effective, we must form the habit of freeing them from the
inhibitive influence of reflection upon them, of egoistic preoccupation
about their results. Such a habit, like other habits, can be formed.
Prudence and duty and self-regard, emotions of ambition and emotions of
anxiety, have, of course, a needful part to play in our lives.
But confine them as far as possible to the occasions when you are
making your general resolutions and deciding on your plans of campaign,
and keep them out of the details. When once a decision is reached and
execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility
and care about the outcome. _Unclamp_, in a word, your intellectual and
practical machinery, and let it run free; and the service it will do you
will be twice as good. Who are the scholars who get 'rattled' in the
recitation-room? Those who think of the possibilities of failure and
feel the great importance of the act. Who are those who do recite well?
Often those who are most indifferent. _Their_ ideas reel themselves out
of their memory of their own accord. Why do we hear the complaint so
often that social life in New England is either less rich and expressive
or more fatiguing than it is in some other parts of the world? To what
is the fact, if fact it be, due unless to the over-active conscience of
the people, afraid of either saying something too trivial and obvious,
or something insincere, or something unworthy of one's interlocutor, or
something in some way or other not adequate to the occasion? How can
conversation possibly steer itself through such a sea of
responsibilities and inhibitions as this? On the other hand,
conversation does flourish and society is refreshing, and neither dull
on the one hand nor exhausting from its effort on the other, wherever
people forget their scruples and take the brakes off their hearts, and
let their tongues wag as automatically and irresponsibly as they will.
They talk much in pedagogic circles to-day about the duty of the teacher
to prepare for every lesson in advance. To some extent this is useful.
But we Yankees are assuredly not those to whom such a general doctrine
should be preached. We are only too careful as it is. The advice I
should give to most teachers would be in the words of one who is herself
an admirable teacher. Prepare yourself in the _subject so well that it
shall be always on tap_: then in the classroom trust your spontaneity
and fling away all further care.
My advice to students, especially to girl-students, would be somewhat
similar. Just as a bicycle-chain may be too tight, so may one's
carefulness and conscientiousness be so tense as to hinder the running
of one's mind. Take, for example, periods when there are many successive
days of examination impending. One ounce of good nervous tone in an
examination is worth many pounds of anxious study for it in advance. If
you want really to do your best in an examination, fling away the book
the day before, say to yourself, "I won't waste another minute on this
miserable thing, and I don't care an iota whether I succeed or not." Say
this sincerely, and feel it; and go out and play, or go to bed and
sleep, and I am sure the results next day will encourage you to use the
method permanently. I have heard this advice given to a student by Miss
Call, whose book on muscular relaxation I quoted a moment ago. In her
later book, entitled 'As a Matter of Course,' the gospel of moral
relaxation, of dropping things from the mind, and not 'caring,' is
preached with equal success. Not only our preachers, but our friends the
theosophists and mind-curers of various religious sects are also harping
on this string. And with the doctors, the Delsarteans, the various
mind-curing sects, and such writers as Mr. Dresser, Prentice Mulford,
Mr. Horace Fletcher, and Mr. Trine to help, and the whole band of
schoolteachers and magazine-readers chiming in, it really looks as if a
good start might be made in the direction of changing our American
mental habit into something more indifferent and strong.
Worry means always and invariably inhibition of associations and loss
of effective power. Of course, the sovereign cure for worry is religious
faith; and this, of course, you also know. The turbulent billows of the
fretful surface leave the deep parts of the ocean undisturbed, and to
him who has a hold on vaster and more permanent realities the hourly
vicissitudes of his personal destiny seem relatively insignificant
things. The really religious person is accordingly unshakable and full
of equanimity, and calmly ready for any duty that the day may bring
forth. This is charmingly illustrated by a little work with which I
recently became acquainted, "The Practice of the Presence of God, the
Best Ruler of a Holy Life, by Brother Lawrence, being Conversations and
Letters of Nicholas Herman of Lorraine, Translated from the French."[C]
I extract a few passages, the conversations being given in indirect
discourse. Brother Lawrence was a Carmelite friar, converted at Paris in
1666. "He said that he had been footman to M. Fieubert, the Treasurer,
and that he was a great awkward fellow, who broke everything. That he
had desired to be received into a monastery, thinking that he would
there be made to smart for his awkwardness and the faults he should
commit, and so he should sacrifice to God his life, with its pleasures;
but that God had disappointed him, he having met with nothing but
satisfaction in that state...."
[C] Fleming H. Revell Company, New York.
"That he had long been troubled in mind from a certain belief that he
should be damned; that all the men in the world could not have persuaded
him to the contrary; but that he had thus reasoned with himself about
it: _I engaged in a religious life only for the love of God, and I have
endeavored to act only for Him; whatever becomes of me, whether I be
lost or saved, I will always continue to act purely for the love of God.
I shall have this good at least, that till death I shall have done all
that is in me to love Him_.... That since then he had passed his life in
perfect liberty and continual joy."
"That when an occasion of practising some virtue offered, he addressed
himself to God, saying, 'Lord, I cannot do this unless thou enablest
me'; and that then he received strength more than sufficient. That, when
he had failed in his duty, he only confessed his fault, saying to God,
'I shall never do otherwise, if You leave me to myself; it is You who
must hinder my failing, and mend what is amiss.' That after this he gave
himself no further uneasiness about it."
"That he had been lately sent into Burgundy to buy the provision of wine
for the society, which was a very unwelcome task for him, because he had
no turn for business, and because he was lame, and could not go about
the boat but by rolling himself over the casks. That, however, he gave
himself no uneasiness about it, nor about the purchase of the wine. That
he said to God, 'It was his business he was about,' and that he
afterward found it well performed. That he had been sent into Auvergne,
the year before, upon the same account; that he could not tell how the
matter passed, but that it proved very well."
"So, likewise, in his business in the kitchen (to which he had naturally
a great aversion), having accustomed himself to do everything there for
the love of God, and with prayer upon all occasions, for his grace to do
his work well, he had found everything easy during fifteen years that he
had been employed there."
"That he was very well pleased with the post he was now in, but that he
was as ready to quit that as the former, since he was always pleasing
himself in every condition, by doing little things for the love of God."
"That the goodness of God assured him he would not forsake him utterly,
and that he would give him strength to bear whatever evil he permitted
to happen to him; and, therefore, that he feared nothing, and had no
occasion to consult with anybody about his state. That, when he had
attempted to do it, he had always come away more perplexed."
The simple-heartedness of the good Brother Lawrence, and the relaxation
of all unnecessary solicitudes and anxieties in him, is a refreshing
spectacle.
* * * * *
The need of feeling responsible all the livelong day has been preached
long enough in our New England. Long enough exclusively, at any
rate,--and long enough to the female sex. What our girl-students and
woman-teachers most need nowadays is not the exacerbation, but rather
the toning-down of their moral tensions. Even now I fear that some one
of my fair hearers may be making an undying resolve to become
strenuously relaxed, cost what it will, for the remainder of her life.
It is needless to say that that is not the way to do it. The way to do
it, paradoxical as it may seem, is genuinely not to care whether you are
doing it or not. Then, possibly, by the grace of God, you may all at
once find that you _are_ doing it, and, having learned what the trick
feels like, you may (again by the grace of God) be enabled to go on.
And that something like this may be the happy experience of all my
hearers is, in closing, my most earnest wish.