MORTIFICATION
Mortification is a word with an interesting etymology. It means
literally the dying or more properly the putting to death of one part
of an animal body while the rest is alive. From this it has come to
mean, to quote the Century Dictionary, "The act of subduing the
passions and appetites by penance, abstinence or painful severities
inflicted on the body." It has had this signification from the very
earliest times of Christianity, for the early Fathers spoke of dying
to self to have a higher and a nobler life. It is used exactly in this
sense in the old medieval Latin as well as by that first great prose
writer in modern English, Sir Thomas More, for he spoke of "the
mortification of the fleshly woorkes" in just this signification.
After all our recent Poet Laureate, when in "In Memoriam" he summed up
so much of the current thought of our time, expressed the same ideas
as the earlier religious authorities when he said that "we rise on
stepping stones of our dead selves to higher things."
It was a favorite idea of the Greeks of the classical period that the
way to get most out of life was to repress the body and give the mind
and soul a chance. Aristotle said, "The vanities of the world are a
hindrance to the soul," and he paraphrased by anticipation that
expression which came to mean so much during the war that our {148}
rising generation learned the precious lesson "that there are things
in life worth more than life itself" when he said, "'T is better for
the soul's sake to suffer death than to lose the soul for the love of
this life." Socrates had said before him, "A wise man ought to look as
carefully to his soul as to his body", and Plato, going straight to
the point, declared, "Whoso desireth the life of his soul ought to
mortify the body and give it trouble in this world." No one knew
better than Plato that the desire of having things did more than aught
else to make the higher life impossible. He did not hesitate to say,
and the expression constitutes one of the most striking commentaries
on our time that we could have, "the soul is lost that delighteth in
covetousness." Pythagoras long before the group of the classical
period had said, "Order thyself so that thy soul may always be in good
estate; whatsoever become of thy body."
It would be easy to find almost as many expressions commending
mortification among the old Greek philosophers as among the Fathers of
the Church. Plato said, "He obeyeth many that obeyeth his body." And
Aristotle said, "He that hath bound himself to follow his fleshly
delights is more bound than any caitiff", which after all, is only
another way of wording Plato's expression, "the worst bondage is to be
subject to vices." Seneca, five centuries afterwards in Rome,
declared, "Too much liberty turneth into bondage", doubtless
imitating, as he did so often, Euripides, who declared, "Better is it
to be free in heart and bond in name than to be free in name and bond
in heart."
In spite of this very respectable ancient lineage which would indicate
an agreement for many centuries among thoughtful people that
mortification has a definite place {149} in life, many in our time
seem inclined to think that the idea underlying the word is a mistake,
and that the virtue attributed to it does not actually work out in
practice. Hence mortification is at present considered by a good many
to be only one of the good old ways of life evolved in an earlier day
when men were less capable of judging of the significance of things
than they are now, but which humanity ought to set definitely back in
the lumber room of discarded notions, now that an era of really
rational development of humanity has come. The old-fashioned idea that
in this way the passions can be controlled is looked upon as a sort of
worn-out superstition, good enough for people who did not know as much
as we do and who did not understand as we have come to understand the
profounder psychology of humanity. We are apparently quite sure in our
time that sweet reasonableness must be the only rule for mankind and
that anything so crude as self-inflicted suffering is not needed by
generations which have not sounded the depth of human nature as we
have done.
Nothing is commoner than to read tirades of various kinds against the
practices of mortification that were in vogue in the older times. A
great many writers who think themselves well informed feel assured
that the people of the olden time performed the most difficult acts of
penance and inflicted intense self-suffering on themselves with no
other purpose in view than to curry favor with the Almighty quite as
if they felt that the Creator delighted in the suffering of His
creatures. They do not seem to realize at all that the real reason why
the older peoples thought such self-inflicted suffering might be
looked upon with favor from on High was that the efforts required to
perform these acts strengthened their wills {150} so as to enable them
to repress their passions and inordinate desires and to control the
tendencies to do wrong which are in every nature and which require
constant watching and subjection, or they prove extremely difficult to
master.
Before the war, when the world generally was rather inclined to take a
good deal of its psychology from Germany, the scoffing tone with
regard to mortification was particularly rife in academic circles.
While other nations as a rule did not adopt the German idea of the
superman, they were usually much more tinctured with that teaching
than they suspected. Nietzsche's great teaching was that a man must
follow his instincts and develop his personality to the highest,
regardless of the consequences to others. One of his famous parables
is that of the soft coal and the diamond. The soft coal is heard
complaining to the diamond, "We are brothers, why then do you scratch
me?" and the diamond replies, "Since we are brothers how is it that I
can scratch you; why are you not as hard as I am, and then all would
be well between us?" and Nietzsche's conclusion was, "For I preach to
you a new doctrine; be ye hard." As Germany had more professors of
psychology than any other nation, it is easy to understand what
far-reaching influence her teaching had. A very few were conservative,
but most were radical, and the only consolation that we have now is to
realize that the nation which had the most professors of psychology
least understood the minds of men, as was demonstrated very clearly by
the egregious blunders which the German government made with regard to
the neutral nations during the course of the war.
The modern psychologists who have thought most deeply about human
nature do not share at all the {151} supercilious contempt for
mortification and even the habit of performing frequent acts of
self-repression, though they may cost effort and suffering, which so
many thoughtless people are ready to express. Professor William James,
who was surely not at all a medievally minded individual and who is
recognized as one of the leaders of thought in modern psychology, did
not hesitate to express his conclusions on this matter in a paragraph
that should be very well known:
"As a fine practical maxim, relative to these habits of the will, we
may, then, offer something like this: Keep the faculty of effort
alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be
systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points; do
every day or two something for no other reason than that you would
rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it
may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.
Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on
his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time and
possibly may never bring him a return. But if the fire does come,
his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man
who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention,
energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will
stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his
softer fellow mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast."
Above all in youth there is need of enduring hard things in order to
form character and enable people to control themselves and deny
themselves. This is sometimes supposed to be a medieval idea, but
Goethe, with all his leaning toward the ways of the old Greeks and his
liking even for the Olympian religion, did not hesitate to say {152}
that the most important thing in the world for a man was self-denial.
_Entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren_. "You must deny yourself, must
deny yourself." There is only one way to do this, and that is to
practice it by a succession of acts until it becomes habitual. The
great world teacher of this practice is and has always been religion.
Sacrifice has been preached as the very essence of Christianity.
To many people it may seem as though mortification, that is, the
practice of doing a series of things that are hard to do and even
painful to accomplish, in order to increase one's power over oneself
may be beneficial and even necessary for weak characters; but that
surely strong men and women can dispense with any such artificial
support of their personalities. Such an expression must probably be
considered an excuse that enables people to escape the difficulties
and self-denial of practices of mortification, but not at all as a
real reason. Some of the strongest men who have ever lived have
recognized the necessity for the insurance policies of little acts of
supererogation that require real will power to accomplish in order to
keep their strength of character at its top notch of efficiency.
Probably few men in history have ever had a stronger character than
Sir Thomas More. All his life he was noted for the absolute purity of
his motives and the thoroughgoing righteousness of his life. He is the
only man in the history of England who ever cleared the docket of the
Court of Chancery. He was the first lay Lord Chancellor that England
ever had. The opportunities for using his high office for his own
benefit are well illustrated by the expression of Lord Campbell, who
declared of More in his lives of the Lord Chancellors: "I am indeed
reluctant to take leave of Sir Thomas More, {153} not only from his
agreeable qualities and extraordinary merits, but from my abhorrence
of the mean, sordid, unprincipled chancellors who succeeded him and
made the latter half of the reign of Henry VIII the most disgraceful
period in our annals."
Nearly a hundred years after More's death when Lord Bacon was
impeached by the English Parliament, he made as the excuse for having
taken bribes that he was the best Lord Chancellor that England had had
for fifty years. Very probably he was; no one knew that better than
he. Yet Sir Thomas More had gone unscathed through the fire of
temptations such as these to which every Lord Chancellor for a hundred
years afterward yielded; but More went farther, and when it was a
question of conscience he died for what he felt was the right. It did
not matter to him that others had been able to compound with their
consciences; he even told the jury that condemned him that he hoped to
meet them in heaven, but right was right and even death was not too
high a price to pay for its fulfillment. One of More's practices at
times during his life had been the wearing of a hair shirt; even when
in prison--and God knows the Tower of London, with the shadow of the
scaffold hanging over it, would seem to be mortification enough--he
wore his hair shirt, and it was found among his possessions after his
death.
I suppose to-day, after a generation of contemptuous scoffing at
mortification, it may be necessary to explain to many people what a
hair shirt is. It is a very coarse undergarment woven of hair to be
worn next the skin, and the discomfort of the skin surface is so great
that until one gets a little used to it one can scarcely think of
anything else except the constant irritation. It was {154} a very
common practice to wear it in the Middle Ages, and we have the story
of one mother who felt that perhaps nothing would do her boys more
good than to learn to stand something like this in order that they
might be able to withstand youth's temptations. She was Mabel Rich,
the mother of Edmund of Canterbury, who has come to be looked upon as
one of the great characters of English history. For years he suffered
in exile rather than give up to the king the rights of his people and
the Church; this great scholar, professor of Oxford that he was and
leader among men, who might have had all sorts of favors from the king
had he yielded, spent fifteen years in poverty and hardships rather
than yield a point of conscience. He tells that when he and his elder
brother went off to the university, where they were to be gone for
four or five years, their mother packed with their clothes a hair
shirt for each of them. She asked them to wear them occasionally for
her sake and to remember that they had to stand many things in life in
order to keep on the right path. This London tradesman's wife of the
early thirteenth century knew as well as any city mother in modern
times the dangers her boys were going to encounter and which they
would have to go through successfully or lose health of soul and body.
There is apt to be a feeling in many minds that these problems have
only come to be realized in our day, but that is due only to failure
to project our knowledge of human nature into the past. Mabel Rich,
like a good sensible mother, did not make an hysterical appeal that
might cause her boys to feel her fear that they could not keep right,
but she asked them, partly for her sake but mainly for religious
motives, to submit to voluntary sufferings sometimes so that they
might have the strength {155} to bear any temptation that came to
them. Edmund of Canterbury declared, toward the end of his life, that
he owed more to his mother and her example and training for whatever
his character had enabled him to accomplish in life than to any other
single factor.
In the chapter on Purity I have quoted distinguished authorities in
psychology who insist that the one way to strengthen the young man and
the young woman against the allurements of impurity and thus help them
to avoid the extremely serious dangers to health involved in yielding
to such temptations is to have them practice self-denial in little
things. Mortifications of one kind or another are to be undertaken,
and the young folks build up self-control by the doing of things which
are hard, though not obligatory, with the one idea of enabling them to
perform even harder things in self-control whenever it may be
necessary. There are some who seem to think that such practices may
weaken men's powers of accomplishment, as if personality might be
impaired by self-control, but there is no reason to think that.
Foerster, the well-known German writer on ethics, knowing well how
much contempt has been thrown on asceticism in recent years, did not
hesitate to say that the fear of weakness is all due to a
misunderstanding. The ascetic is not a stunted human being who has
mutilated himself, or prevented his development lest by any chance he
might wander so far away from the path to his heavenly home that he
might not get back. Asceticism has for its derivation the Greek verb
[Greek text] which means to exercise,--that is, not to decrease but to
increase power. The ascetic exercises his will power so that he will
be able to follow the straight path that he wants to tread, no matter
how many difficulties present themselves to him. {156} No matter how
steep the hills, he will not turn aside to the pleasanter paths that
lead so gently downward because he wants to "carry on." Professor
Foerster said: "Asceticism should be regarded, not as a negation of
nature nor as an attempt to extirpate natural forces, but as practice
in the art of self-discipline. Its object should be to show humanity
what the human will is capable of performing, to serve as an
encouraging example of the conquest of the spirit over the animal
self. The contempt which has been poured upon the idea of asceticism
in recent times has contributed more than anything else towards
effeminacy. Nothing could be more effective in bringing humanity back
to the best traditions of manhood than a respect for the spiritual
strength and conquest which is symbolised in ascetic lives."
With regard to that anxiety of mothers to help their boys and girls in
the very serious matter of sex temptation which has become so
prominent a social feature in recent years, Foerster has a passage
that is well worth putting before every mother:
"There are plenty of modern mothers who are aware of the necessity
for instruction in matters relating to sex, and who are perhaps
anxiously awaiting the suitable moment: it is a great deal more
important, however, that they should make their children acquainted
with what Sailer called 'the strategy of the Holy War', that they
should train them every now and then to deny themselves some
favourite article of food, or to accomplish some heroic conquest of
indolence, or to practise themselves in ignoring pain.
"The outstanding feature of sexual education should not be an
explanation of the sex functions, but an introduction to the
inexhaustible power of the human spirit {157} and its capacity for
dominating the animal nature and controlling its demands."
Joseph de Maistre once said: "Everything that hinders a man
strengthens him. Many a man of thirty years of age is capable of
successfully resisting the allurements of a beautiful woman because at
the age of five or six he was taught voluntarily to give up a toy or a
sweet!"
Mortification in little things seems to many people too trivial in its
effects to be of any real significance. If there is anything in the
world that has been brought home to us in medicine in the modern era
it is that little things count immensely. Microbes so small that we
not only cannot see them, but never hope to be able to increase the
powers of the microscope in such a way as to be able to get a sight of
them, may cause the most serious epidemics. One of these
ultramicroscopic microbes is probably the cause of infantile
paralysis, which we know to have been in existence over five thousand
years, because the mummy of a princeling of one of the early dynasties
in Egypt shows that its possessor suffered from it as a child. Another
of the ultramicroscopic microbes is perhaps the cause of influenza
which carried off in a few months more victims among young people than
the greatest war in human history did in over four years. No wonder
that little things count in the moral order then, since they may mean
so much in the physical order. Whenever anything affects living
beings, then it cannot be counted small.
Four hundred years ago Michelangelo declared that "trifles make
perfection, but perfection is no trifle." No one had a better right to
an opinion in the matter than he, for he was the greatest sculptor
since the time of {158} the Greeks, one of the greatest architects who
ever lived, perhaps the greatest decorative artist in all history, as
the Sistine Chapel demonstrates, and he wrote sonnets of the highest
quality. If in the mind of so supreme an artist soul little things
count so much in making a great work of art, surely they must count
for a very great deal in making a moral masterpiece, or anything that
approaches it.
Michelangelo himself recognized over and over again in life what
bearing the trials and troubles of existence might have on building up
character for him and bringing him other than an earthly reward. He
once said to one of the popes, "If these fatigues which I endure do
not benefit my soul I lose both time and labor." There is a famous
sonnet of his in which he begs pardon of his Crucified God if he had
ever attributed to himself any of the glory which he ought to have
given to his Maker. If ever a man lived who had the right to have some
conceit of himself it was Michelangelo. When we look around and see
the little whippets who have monumental conceit and then think of
Michelangelo's deprecation of himself, it is easy to understand how he
must have suppressed--or, as they said in the older time,
mortified--his pride in order to keep his humility and not let any
self-exultation run away with him.
Mortification in its true sense is indeed much more a question of the
mind and the heart than of the body. Cultivating detachment from the
things around us means more than anything else. This mortification of
the spirit of man so that material possessions are not allowed to
crowd out the genuine good things of life is particularly important.
Nowadays people are so afraid to be poor, or indeed to lack anything
that their neighbors have, that {159} the principal efforts of life
are expended in "keeping up with the Smiths", or with some other
utterly insignificant people who happen to be making a display. I
suppose that every physician in a large city has known people who
actually denied themselves some of the necessaries of life in order to
wear a little better clothes, and of course every physician everywhere
sees people who deform their feet and disturb their organic health in
other ways trying to keep up with the fashions. The fear of being
thought to have less than other people and of having to deny oneself
something that happens to be fashionable is particularly rife in our
time and plays sad havoc with mental equanimity and with such
satisfaction with life as is the best safeguard of continued health.
There was a time centuries ago, under the Roman Empire, when money had
come to be as much thought of as in our own time, when the wealthy
went down to Naples in the winter, up to Como in the summer, had a
house at Ostia as well as a palace in Rome. It is easy to understand
that the people then as now failed to comprehend how any one could
possibly choose to be poor, even though thus he succeeded in putting
off the cares of wealth and gave himself an opportunity to live his
life for the sake of higher things.
Religion raised up men who went into voluntary poverty and restored
the dignity of labor, when manual work had become almost a disgrace,
by deliberately electing to occupy themselves with it for a certain
number of hours a day. Their example proved very precious, and as it
was mainly the young men who did it, they influenced deeply a series
of generations. The sons of the nobility as well as of professional
classes were represented among {160} these reformers who believed
first in reforming themselves, but along with them were young men of
all classes, and the barriers between the classes were thus lowered.
The cultivation of religious poverty proved the greatest kind of
blessing in the social order and has always meant much for the
amelioration of social conditions which it brings with it.
I suppose that the greatest possible benefit for health that could be
conferred on mankind at the present time would come from the
eradication of the mad strife for the possession of money which has
taken possession of so many men's minds. Our recent Great War was
precipitated by the struggle for markets and favored nations among
whom to distribute surplus industrial products so that certain nations
might go on piling up money. This is so badly distributed that serious
social disorders are impending. Men spend their lives getting money
and then leave it to their children, to hurt them physically and
morally. They take away incentive, and they provide the greatest
possible facilities for temptations. Justice Hughes said some years
ago, when governor of New York, "The main occupation of men in our
time seems to be the raising of a corruption fund for their children."
We need some of that poverty of spirit which Christianity brought in
with it when it was so sadly needed and which was cultivated with so
much success during the later Middle Ages, when the great scholars and
saintly characters who most deeply influenced the times were mainly
members of the mendicant orders, that is, of associations of men who
refused to own any possessions in order that they might have the time
to devote themselves to higher things and who depended on the {161}
work of their hands and the beneficence of the public to enable them
to continue their work. Their motto was plain living and high
thinking, and it is surprising how much they accomplished. The spirit
which made St. Francis of Assisi choose the Lady Poverty for his bride
and delight to call himself _Il poverello di Dio_, "the little poor
man of God", would seem to be entirely too impracticable and utterly
idealistic to have any interest for our time, and yet literally more
than a score of important lives of St. Francis have been written
during our generation. We are beginning to wake up to the realization
of the fact that "things are in the saddle and ride mankind", and that
things seem ever so much more important than thoughts, though it
requires no special intelligence to understand what an utter
contradiction of real values any such state of mind represents.
What is now needed above all is such detachment from the things around
us that we shall be poor in spirit. This is the element above all that
religion supplies. In the Sermon on the Mount, that greatest sermon
ever preached, the Master said, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for
theirs is the kingdom of heaven." Certainly there is no straighter
road to heavenly peace than that, for a man may have great possessions
and yet be poor in spirit because he is detached from them and has
mortified his feelings with regard to them so that they do not puff
him up and make him vain (what striking old Saxon words those are), so
that he is able to use them not for himself alone but for the benefit
of the community.
The expression "poor in spirit" is not popular in our time and has
often been spoken of contemptuously. There are some who think that
actual poverty, as well as poverty of spirit, has a paralyzing effect
on human {162} incentive, but it is well to realize that there are a
good many serious thinkers in our generation who do not agree with
this impression but on the contrary feel that detachment from temporal
goods may well prove a source of the highest and best stimulation to
the accomplishment of what is really worth while in life. Some of them
express themselves rather strongly on the subject, and perhaps no one
has stated his mind more emphatically with regard to it than Professor
William James, who did not hesitate to declare just when money had
come to be apparently the most important thing in modern life: "Among
us English-speaking peoples especially do the praises of poverty need
once more to be boldly sung. We have grown literally afraid to be
poor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify
and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and
pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking
in ambition. We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient
idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material
attachments; the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference; the paying
our way by what we are or do and not by what we have; the right to
fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly--the more athletic
trim, in short, the moral fighting shape. When we of the so-called
better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at
material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our
house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child
without a bank account, it is time for thinking men to protest against
so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.... I recommend this
matter to your serious pondering, for it is certain that the prevalent
fear of poverty among the {163} educated classes is the worst moral
disease from which our civilization suffers."
All the great religions have preached mortification. Some of them have
made it apparently of value in itself as working merit, but this was
practically always an abuse of the original idea that a man learned to
control himself by practicing hard things. Our generation resents even
the term "hard things" and does not like to hear "hard sayings",
though even that gentlest of human beings, the Divine Master, felt
that He had to use them. There can be no doubt at all, however, about
the benefit to be derived from enduring hard things. Every trainer who
hopes to have a winning team in any department of athletics knows that
he has to put them through hard things in order to enable them to
acquire power and make their energies available when they are needed.
Somehow people do not seem to realize that exactly the same thing is
necessary with regard to training of the will as for training of the
muscles, and that indeed training of the muscles is of itself
effective largely because of the training of the will connected with
it which makes the nervous system capable of reacting according to the
desires of the individual.
While we are so intent on making things easy for the young, let us not
forget that the best authorities on the subject of man's development
of his powers so as to make them available for life's purposes are
practically all agreed that the most important element in the
formation of character--and on character depends destiny--is the
having to go through hard things when one is young. In the chapter on
Suffering I have quoted Thucydides in this matter and its approval by
Gladstone and John Morley in our own time. We hear much of a favorable
{164} environment for young folks but most of what is so called
represents the worst possible set of influences for the development of
character.
Professor Conklin of Princeton, in his volume on "Heredity and
Environment," which consists of lectures delivered on the Harris
Foundation of the Northwestern University and afterwards at Princeton,
and which therefore must be taken to represent the scientific thought
of our time, does not hesitate to say:
"How often is it said that the worthless sons of worthy parents are
mysteries; with the best of heredity and environment they amount to
nothing, whereas the sons of poor and ignorant farmers, blacksmiths,
tanners and backwoodsmen, with few opportunities and with many
hardships and disadvantages, become world figures. Probably the
inheritance in these last-named cases was no better than in the
former, but the environment was better. 'Good environment' usually
means easy, pleasant, refined surroundings, 'all the opportunities
that money can buy', but little responsibility and none of that
self-discipline which reveals the hidden powers and which alone
should be counted good environment. Many schools and colleges are
making the same mistake as the fond parents; luxury, soft living,
irresponsibility are not only allowed, but are encouraged and
endowed--and by such means it is hoped to bring out that in men
which can only be born in travail."
Above all, mortification, that is, the suppressing of the natural
inclinations, must be practiced for health's sake as regards the
bearing of ills that have to be suffered anyhow, and in the
forbearance from passion when that would certainly prove physically
disturbing. "Bear and forbear" has been sometimes set down as the most
{165} important formula for life, and it is certainly as valuable for
the physical as for the moral side of humanity. The repression of the
natural tendencies is an extremely valuable practice for the
prevention of the many excesses which have so much to do with the
undermining of health. The man who controls himself and compels his
instincts to submit to correction and modification, even when that is
unnecessary, so far as any serious consideration is concerned, will
surely find himself in a position to resist natural proclivities to
evil which may easily be serious from the standpoint of health,
whenever they assert themselves.
Austerity is supposed to be old-fashioned and out of date, but all
those who want to get anything really worth while done in the world
know that they must deny themselves and their inclinations and work
out their ideas in lonely vigil and by hard work. Nothing that is easy
counts. When men do things that will be remembered they have devoted
themselves whole-heartedly to them to the exclusion of more attractive
occupations.
Matthew Arnold, in his splendid sonnet on Austerity as the poet must
practice it, has brought this out very forcibly. He tells the story of
Jacopone da Todi, the author of the Stabat Mater, who, on his wedding
day, saw his bride of the morning killed by the fall of a stand at a
spectacle and found beneath her bridal robes a penitential garment. He
was so deeply impressed that he became a Franciscan and subsequently
the author of the famous hymn. Certainly pathos was never more
wondrously expressed than by this man whose own austerities, initiated
by the example of his beloved bride, made him ready to strip himself
of every trivial interest in the cult of the eternal verities.
{166}
"That son of Italy who tried to blow,
Ere Dante came, the trump of sacred song,
In his light youth amid a festal throng
Sate with his bride to see a public show.
Fair was the bride, and on her front did glow
Youth like a star; and what to youth belong--
Gay raiment, sparkling gauds, elation strong.
A prop gave way! crash fell a platform! lo,
'Mid struggling sufferers, hurt to death, she lay!
Shuddering, they drew her garments off--and found
A robe of sackcloth next the smooth, white skin.
Such, poets, is your bride, the Muse! young, gay,
Radiant, adorn'd, outside; a hidden ground
Of thought and of austerity within."
So far from mortification being in any sense of the word an
old-fashioned, worn-out practice, good enough for the foolish people
of the dark ages who had nothing better to think of, it is, in so far
as it brings about training of the will and exercise in self-denial
and self-control, the most important element in education at all
times. We have unfortunately been neglecting it, but that neglect is
the real trouble with our modern education. Nearly every one who talks
about education has some mental panacea for it; but the trouble lies
deeper than that. It is the education of the will that has
unfortunately been neglected and that requires, to cite once more the
Century definition, the subduing of appetites, even though painful
severities should have to be inflicted on the body.
Huxley, in his address on "A Liberal Education; and Where to Find It",
delivered before the South London Workingmen's College, has a passage
in which he brings this out very well. Almost needless to say Huxley
was the farthest possible from being medievally minded, and {167} yet
he placed the essence of a liberal education in will power over self
rather than in intellectual development, or above all the accumulation
of information. He said:
"That man, I think, has had a liberal education who has been so
trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and
does with ease and pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is
capable of; whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all
its parts of equal strength and in smooth working order; ready, like
a steam engine, to be turned to any kind of work and spin the
gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is
stored with a knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of
nature and of the laws of her operations; one who, no stunted
ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to
come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience;
who has learned to love all beauty, whether of nature or of art, to
hate all vileness, and to respect others as himself.
"Such an one and no other, I conceive, has had a liberal education;
for he is, as completely as a man can be, in harmony with nature."
{168}