tobacco as much as I loved my meat, and I would rather go down
into the mine without my dinner than without my pipe. In the days
of old, the Lord spoke by the mouths of his servants, the
prophets; now he speaks to us by the spirit of his Son. I had not
only the feeling part of religion, but I could hear the small,
still voice within speaking to me. When I took the pipe to smoke,
it would be applied within, ‘It is an idol, a lust; worship the
Lord with clean lips.’ So, I felt it was not right to smoke. The
Lord also sent a woman to convince me. I was one day in a house,
and I took out my pipe to light it at the fire, and Mary Hawke—for
that was the woman’s name—said, ‘Do you not feel it is wrong to
smoke?’ I said that I felt something inside telling me that it was
an idol, a lust, and she said that was the Lord. Then I said,
‘Now, I must give it up, for the Lord is telling me of it inside,
and the woman outside, so the tobacco must go, love it as I may.’
There and then I took the tobacco out of my pocket, and threw it
into the fire, and put the pipe under my foot, ‘ashes to ashes,
dust to dust.’ And I have not smoked since. I found it hard to
break off old habits, but I cried to the Lord for help, and he
gave me strength, for he has said, ‘Call upon me in the day of
trouble, and I will deliver thee.’ The day after I gave up smoking
I had the toothache so bad that I did not know what to do. I
thought this was owing to giving up the pipe, but I said I would
never smoke again, if I lost every tooth in my head. I said,
‘Lord, thou hast told us My yoke is easy and my burden is light,’
and when I said that, all the pain left me. Sometimes the thought
of the pipe would come back to me very strong; but the Lord
strengthened me against the habit, and, bless his name, I have not
smoked since.”
Bray’s biographer writes that after he had given up smoking, he
thought that he would chew a little, but he conquered this dirty
habit, too. “On one occasion,” Bray said, “when at a prayer‐
meeting at Hicks Mill, I heard the Lord say to me, ‘Worship me
with clean lips.’ So, when we got up from our knees, I took the
quid out of my mouth and ‘whipped ’en’ [threw it] under the form.
But, when we got on our knees again, I put another quid into my
mouth. Then the Lord said to me again, ‘Worship me with clean
lips.’ So I took the quid out of my mouth, and whipped ’en under
the form again, and said, ‘Yes, Lord, I will.’ From that time I
gave up chewing as well as smoking, and have been a free man.”
The ascetic forms which the impulse for veracity and purity of life may
take are often pathetic enough. The early Quakers, for example, had hard
battles to wage against the worldliness and insincerity of the
ecclesiastical Christianity of their time. Yet the battle that cost them
most wounds was probably that which they fought in defense of their own
right to social veracity and sincerity in their thee‐ing and thou‐ing, in
not doffing the hat or giving titles of respect. It was laid on George Fox
that these conventional customs were a lie and a sham, and the whole body
of his followers thereupon renounced them, as a sacrifice to truth, and so
that their acts and the spirit they professed might be more in accord.
“When the Lord sent me into the world,” says Fox in his Journal,
“he forbade me to put off my hat to any, high or low: and I was
required to ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ all men and women, without any
respect to rich or poor, great or small. And as I traveled up and
down, I was not to bid people Good‐morning, or Good‐evening,
neither might I bow or scrape with my leg to any one. This made
the sects and professions rage. Oh! the rage that was in the
priests, magistrates, professors, and people of all sorts: and
especially in priests and professors: for though ‘thou’ to a
single person was according to their accidence and grammar rules,
and according to the Bible, yet they could not bear to hear it:
and because I could not put off my hat to them, it set them all
into a rage.... Oh! the scorn, heat, and fury that arose! Oh! the
blows, punchings, beatings, and imprisonments that we underwent
for not putting off our hats to men! Some had their hats violently
plucked off and thrown away, so that they quite lost them. The bad
language and evil usage we received on this account is hard to be
expressed, besides the danger we were sometimes in of losing our
lives for this matter, and that by the great professors of
Christianity, who thereby discovered they were not true believers.
And though it was but a small thing in the eye of man, yet a
wonderful confusion it brought among all professors and priests:
but, blessed be the Lord, many came to see the vanity of that
custom of putting off hats to men, and felt the weight of Truth’s
testimony against it.”
In the autobiography of Thomas Elwood, an early Quaker, who at one time
was secretary to John Milton, we find an exquisitely quaint and candid
account of the trials he underwent both at home and abroad, in following
Fox’s canons of sincerity. The anecdotes are too lengthy for citation; but
Elwood sets down his manner of feeling about these things in a shorter
passage, which I will quote as a characteristic utterance of spiritual
sensibility:—
“By this divine light, then,” says Elwood, “I saw that though I
had not the evil of the common uncleanliness, debauchery,
profaneness, and pollutions of the world to put away, because I
had, through the great goodness of God and a civil education, been
preserved out of those grosser evils, yet I had many other evils
to put away and to cease from; some of which were not by the
world, which lies in wickedness (1 John v. 19), accounted evils,
but by the light of Christ were made manifest to me to be evils,
and as such condemned in me.
“As particularly those fruits and effects of pride that discover
themselves in the vanity and superfluity of apparel; which I took
too much delight in. This evil of my doings I was required to put
away and cease from; and judgment lay upon me till I did so.
“I took off from my apparel those unnecessary trimmings of lace,
ribbons, and useless buttons, which had no real service, but were
set on only for that which was by mistake called ornament; and I
ceased to wear rings.
“Again, the giving of flattering titles to men between whom and me
there was not any relation to which such titles could be pretended
to belong. This was an evil I had been much addicted to, and was
accounted a ready artist in; therefore this evil also was I
required to put away and cease from. So that thenceforward I durst
not say, Sir, Master, My Lord, Madam (or My Dame); or say Your
Servant to any one to whom I did not stand in the real relation of
a servant, which I had never done to any.
“Again, respect of persons, in uncovering the head and bowing the
knee or body in salutation, was a practice I had been much in the
use of; and this, being one of the vain customs of the world,
introduced by the spirit of the world, instead of the true honor
which this is a false representation of, and used in deceit as a
token of respect by persons one to another, who bear no real
respect one to another; and besides this, being a type and a
proper emblem of that divine honor which all ought to pay to
Almighty God, and which all of all sorts, who take upon them the
Christian name, appear in when they offer their prayers to him,
and therefore should not be given to men;—I found this to be one
of those evils which I had been too long doing; therefore I was
now required to put it away and cease from it.
“Again, the corrupt and unsound form of speaking in the plural
number to a single person, _you_ to one, instead of _thou_,
contrary to the pure, plain, and single language of truth, _thou_
to one, and _you_ to more than one, which had always been used by
God to men, and men to God, as well as one to another, from the
oldest record of time till corrupt men, for corrupt ends, in later
and corrupt times, to flatter, fawn, and work upon the corrupt
nature in men, brought in that false and senseless way of speaking
_you_ to one, which has since corrupted the modern languages, and
hath greatly debased the spirits and depraved the manners of
men;—this evil custom I had been as forward in as others, and this
I was now called out of and required to cease from.
“These and many more evil customs which had sprung up in the night
of darkness and general apostasy from the truth and true religion
were now, by the inshining of this pure ray of divine light in my
conscience, gradually discovered to me to be what I ought to cease
from, shun, and stand a witness against.”(175)
These early Quakers were Puritans indeed. The slightest inconsistency
between profession and deed jarred some of them to active protest. John
Woolman writes in his diary:—
“In these journeys I have been where much cloth hath been dyed;
and have at sundry times walked over ground where much of their
dyestuffs has drained away. This hath produced a longing in my
mind that people might come into cleanness of spirit, cleanness of
person, and cleanness about their houses and garments. Dyes being
invented partly to please the eye, and partly to hide dirt, I have
felt in this weak state, when traveling in dirtiness, and affected
with unwholesome scents, a strong desire that the nature of dyeing
cloth to hide dirt may be more fully considered.
“Washing our garments to keep them sweet is cleanly, but it is the
opposite to real cleanliness to hide dirt in them. Through giving
way to hiding dirt in our garments a spirit which would conceal
that which is disagreeable is strengthened. Real cleanliness
becometh a holy people; but hiding that which is not clean by
coloring our garments seems contrary to the sweetness of
sincerity. Through some sorts of dyes cloth is rendered less
useful. And if the value of dyestuffs, and expense of dyeing, and
the damage done to cloth, were all added together, and that cost
applied to keeping all sweet and clean, how much more would real
cleanliness prevail.
“Thinking often on these things, the use of hats and garments dyed
with a dye hurtful to them, and wearing more clothes in summer
than are useful, grew more uneasy to me; believing them to be
customs which have not their foundation in pure wisdom. The
apprehension of being singular from my beloved friends was a
strait upon me; and thus I continued in the use of some things,
contrary to my judgment, about nine months. Then I thought of
getting a hat the natural color of the fur, but the apprehension
of being looked upon as one affecting singularity felt uneasy to
me. On this account I was under close exercise of mind in the time
of our general spring meeting in 1762, greatly desiring to be
rightly directed; when, being deeply bowed in spirit before the
Lord, I was made willing to submit to what I apprehended was
required of me; and when I returned home, got a hat of the natural
color of the fur.
“In attending meetings, this singularity was a trial to me, and
more especially at this time, as white hats were used by some who
were fond of following the changeable modes of dress, and as some
friends, who knew not from what motives I wore it, grew shy of me,
I felt my way for a time shut up in the exercise of the ministry.
Some friends were apprehensive that my wearing such a hat savored
of an affected singularity: those who spoke with me in a friendly
way, I generally informed in a few words, that I believed my
wearing it was not in my own will.”
When the craving for moral consistency and purity is developed to this
degree, the subject may well find the outer world too full of shocks to
dwell in, and can unify his life and keep his soul unspotted only by
withdrawing from it. That law which impels the artist to achieve harmony
in his composition by simply dropping out whatever jars, or suggests a
discord, rules also in the spiritual life. To omit, says Stevenson, is the
one art in literature: “If I knew how to omit, I should ask no other
knowledge.” And life, when full of disorder and slackness and vague
superfluity, can no more have what we call character than literature can
have it under similar conditions. So monasteries and communities of
sympathetic devotees open their doors, and in their changeless order,
characterized by omissions quite as much as constituted of actions, the
holy‐minded person finds that inner smoothness and cleanness which it is
torture to him to feel violated at every turn by the discordancy and
brutality of secular existence.
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
That the scrupulosity of purity may be carried to a fantastic extreme must
be admitted. In this it resembles Asceticism, to which further symptom of
saintliness we had better turn next. The adjective “ascetic” is applied to
conduct originating on diverse psychological levels, which I might as well
begin by distinguishing from one another.
1. Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood,
disgusted with too much ease.
2. Temperance in meat and drink, simplicity of apparel, chastity,
and non‐pampering of the body generally, may be fruits of the love
of purity, shocked by whatever savors of the sensual.
3. They may also be fruits of love, that is, they may appeal to
the subject in the light of sacrifices which he is happy in making
to the Deity whom he acknowledges.
4. Again, ascetic mortifications and torments may be due to
pessimistic feelings about the self, combined with theological
beliefs concerning expiation. The devotee may feel that he is
buying himself free, or escaping worse sufferings hereafter, by
doing penance now.
5. In psychopathic persons, mortifications may be entered on
irrationally, by a sort of obsession or fixed idea which comes as
a challenge and must be worked off, because only thus does the
subject get his interior consciousness feeling right again.
6. Finally, ascetic exercises may in rarer instances be prompted
by genuine perversions of the bodily sensibility, in consequence
of which normally pain‐giving stimuli are actually felt as
pleasures.
I will try to give an instance under each of these heads in turn; but it
is not easy to get them pure, for in cases pronounced enough to be
immediately classed as ascetic, several of the assigned motives usually
work together. Moreover, before citing any examples at all, I must invite
you to some general psychological considerations which apply to all of
them alike.
A strange moral transformation has within the past century swept over our
Western world. We no longer think that we are called on to face physical
pain with equanimity. It is not expected of a man that he should either
endure it or inflict much of it, and to listen to the recital of cases of
it makes our flesh creep morally as well as physically. The way in which
our ancestors looked upon pain as an eternal ingredient of the world’s
order, and both caused and suffered it as a matter‐of‐course portion of
their day’s work, fills us with amazement. We wonder that any human beings
could have been so callous. The result of this historic alteration is that
even in the Mother Church herself, where ascetic discipline has such a
fixed traditional prestige as a factor of merit, it has largely come into
desuetude, if not discredit. A believer who flagellates or “macerates”
himself to‐day arouses more wonder and fear than emulation. Many Catholic
writers who admit that the times have changed in this respect do so
resignedly; and even add that perhaps it is as well not to waste feelings
in regretting the matter, for to return to the heroic corporeal discipline
of ancient days might be an extravagance.
Where to seek the easy and the pleasant seems instinctive—and instinctive
it appears to be in man; any deliberate tendency to pursue the hard and
painful as such and for their own sakes might well strike one as purely
abnormal. Nevertheless, in moderate degrees it is natural and even usual
to human nature to court the arduous. It is only the extreme
manifestations of the tendency that can be regarded as a paradox.
The psychological reasons for this lie near the surface. When we drop
abstractions and take what we call our will in the act, we see that it is
a very complex function. It involves both stimulations and inhibitions; it
follows generalized habits; it is escorted by reflective criticisms; and
it leaves a good or a bad taste of itself behind, according to the manner
of the performance. The result is that, quite apart from the immediate
pleasure which any sensible experience may give us, our own general moral
attitude in procuring or undergoing the experience brings with it a
secondary satisfaction or distaste. Some men and women, indeed, there are
who can live on smiles and the word “yes” forever. But for others (indeed
for most), this is too tepid and relaxed a moral climate. Passive
happiness is slack and insipid, and soon grows mawkish and intolerable.
Some austerity and wintry negativity, some roughness, danger, stringency,
and effort, some “no! no!” must be mixed in, to produce the sense of an
existence with character and texture and power. The range of individual
differences in this respect is enormous; but whatever the mixture of yeses
and noes may be, the person is infallibly aware when he has struck it in
the right proportion _for him_. This, he feels, is my proper vocation,
this is the _optimum_, the law, the life for me to live. Here I find the
degree of equilibrium, safety, calm, and leisure which I need, or here I
find the challenge, passion, fight, and hardship without which my soul’s
energy expires.
Every individual soul, in short, like every individual machine or
organism, has its own best conditions of efficiency. A given machine will
run best under a certain steam‐pressure, a certain amperage; an organism
under a certain diet, weight, or exercise. You seem to do best, I heard a
doctor say to a patient, at about 140 millimeters of arterial tension. And
it is just so with our sundry souls: some are happiest in calm weather;
some need the sense of tension, of strong volition, to make them feel
alive and well. For these latter souls, whatever is gained from day to day
must be paid for by sacrifice and inhibition, or else it comes too cheap
and has no zest.
Now when characters of this latter sort become religious, they are apt to
turn the edge of their need of effort and negativity against their natural
self; and the ascetic life gets evolved as a consequence.
When Professor Tyndall in one of his lectures tells us that Thomas Carlyle
put him into his bath‐tub every morning of a freezing Berlin winter, he
proclaimed one of the lowest grades of asceticism. Even without Carlyle,
most of us find it necessary to our soul’s health to start the day with a
rather cool immersion. A little farther along the scale we get such
statements as this, from one of my correspondents, an agnostic:—
“Often at night in my warm bed I would feel ashamed to depend so
on the warmth, and whenever the thought would come over me I would
have to get up, no matter what time of night it was, and stand for
a minute in the cold, just so as to prove my manhood.”
Such cases as these belong simply to our head 1. In the next case we
probably have a mixture of heads 2 and 3—the asceticism becomes far more
systematic and pronounced. The writer is a Protestant, whose sense of
moral energy could doubtless be gratified on no lower terms, and I take
his case from Starbuck’s manuscript collection.
“I practiced fasting and mortification of the flesh. I secretly
made burlap shirts, and put the burrs next the skin, and wore
pebbles in my shoes. I would spend nights flat on my back on the
floor without any covering.”
The Roman Church has organized and codified all this sort of thing, and
given it a market‐value in the shape of “merit.” But we see the
cultivation of hardship cropping out under every sky and in every faith,
as a spontaneous need of character. Thus we read of Channing, when first
settled as a Unitarian minister, that—
“He was now more simple than ever, and seemed to have become
incapable of any form of self‐indulgence. He took the smallest
room in the house for his study, though he might easily have
commanded one more light, airy, and in every way more suitable;
and chose for his sleeping chamber an attic which he shared with a
younger brother. The furniture of the latter might have answered
for the cell of an anchorite, and consisted of a hard mattress on
a cot‐bedstead, plain wooden chairs and table, with matting on the
floor. It was without fire, and to cold he was throughout life
extremely sensitive; but he never complained or appeared in any
way to be conscious of inconvenience. ‘I recollect,’ says his
brother, ‘after one most severe night, that in the morning he
sportively thus alluded to his suffering: “If my bed were my
country, I should be somewhat like Bonaparte: I have no control
except over the part which I occupy; the instant I move, frost
takes possession.” ’ In sickness only would he change for the time
his apartment and accept a few comforts. The dress too that he
habitually adopted was of most inferior quality; and garments were
constantly worn which the world would call mean, though an almost
feminine neatness preserved him from the least appearance of
neglect.”(176)
Channing’s asceticism, such as it was, was evidently a compound of
hardihood and love of purity. The democracy which is an offshoot of the
enthusiasm of humanity, and of which I will speak later under the head of
the cult of poverty, doubtless bore also a share. Certainly there was no
pessimistic element in his case. In the next case we have a strongly
pessimistic element, so that it belongs under head 4. John Cennick was
Methodism’s first lay preacher. In 1735 he was convicted of sin, while
walking in Cheapside,—
“And at once left off song‐singing, card‐playing, and attending
theatres. Sometimes he wished to go to a popish monastery, to
spend his life in devout retirement. At other times he longed to
live in a cave, sleeping on fallen leaves, and feeding on forest
fruits. He fasted long and often, and prayed nine times a day....
Fancying dry bread too great an indulgence for so great a sinner
as himself, he began to feed on potatoes, acorns, crabs, and
grass; and often wished that he could live on roots and herbs. At
length, in 1737, he found peace with God, and went on his way
rejoicing.”(177)
In this poor man we have morbid melancholy and fear, and the sacrifices
made are to purge out sin, and to buy safety. The hopelessness of
Christian theology in respect of the flesh and the natural man generally
has, in systematizing fear, made of it one tremendous incentive to self‐
mortification. It would be quite unfair, however, in spite of the fact
that this incentive has often been worked in a mercenary way for hortatory
purposes, to call it a mercenary incentive. The impulse to expiate and do
penance is, in its first intention, far too immediate and spontaneous an
expression of self‐despair and anxiety to be obnoxious to any such
reproach. In the form of loving sacrifice, of spending all we have to show
our devotion, ascetic discipline of the severest sort may be the fruit of
highly optimistic religious feeling.
M. Vianney, the curé of Ars, was a French country priest, whose holiness
was exemplary. We read in his life the following account of his inner need
of sacrifice:—