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}