EXCESSES
The most important rule of conduct for health is the avoidance of
excesses of any and every kind. Men have recognized this fact for as
long as the memory of the race runs. The instruction of Ptah Hotep,
the letter of advice from a father to his son, written by the vizier
of King Itosi in the fifth dynasty in Egypt, something over five
thousand years ago, which is often called the oldest book in the
world, emphasizes particularly the necessity for the avoidance of
excess in all things. Self-control and self-denial are held up as the
highest attributes of man. One of the seven wise men of Greece adopted
as his contribution to the wisdom of mankind "avoid excess." A
favorite maxim of the Romans was _ne quid nimis_, "let there be
nothing too much"; and another favorite expression of theirs was _in
medio tutissimus ibis_, "you will go most safely if you follow the
mean" (and not either extreme).
The most powerful factor for securing the avoidance of excess among
men has always been religion. The four cardinal virtues are prudence,
justice, fortitude and temperance, and the last is considered by no
means the least. Almost needless to say, by temperance was meant not
only abstinence from excessive drinking and eating, but that
moderation and self-control in all things which the ancients
recognized as the most important factor in human life, and which
religion, trying to perfect {169} nature by grace, set forth as one of
the cardinal or "hinge" qualities on which the whole of a good life
swings. When reason and not impulse, when virtue and not passion, when
strength of character and not weakness rule a man's life, the motives
which impel him or, as we would rather say in our modern knowledge of
psychology, stimulate him to action and enable him to accomplish what
he desires in so important a matter are drawn much oftener from
religion than from any other source.
Religion has done more than anything else to make people rational in
their lives and not merely the sport of their impulses and instincts.
Men are animals, but possessed of reason, though reason can be
obscured to a great extent or even almost completely eclipsed by the
impulses that arise from the lower nature of man. Religion has above
all helped to make men think of others who are so often hurt by their
unreason rather than themselves, and has helped to keep them from
self-indulgence.
Abernethy, the distinguished surgeon who impressed himself so deeply
on the history of medicine in London at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, was accustomed to say that the two great killing
powers in the world are stuff and fret,--in a word, eating too much
and worrying about things, most of which will never happen. Satisfying
the desires of mankind and fostering their dreads will do more to wear
out life before its time than anything else. Religion represents the
ever present signpost pointing away from travel in either of these
directions. Men do not heed her warnings very often until they have
gone so far on the road of life that some of their powers have been
lost because of their neglect, but at least they can recognize then
that the signposts are {170} always in place, and that they saw them,
and that it was their own fault if they did not follow them.
Homer, three thousand years ago, told the poetic story of the men who
had been turned into swine by Circe and who, though swine, knew that
they were men, but could not get back to the use of their reason. The
similitude lies so close that it is perfectly clear that the idea
behind the old myth of the goddess who invited men to share swinish
pleasures and secured such control over them that they could not get
back their reason again was the goddess of lubricity. Ulysses himself
had to abstain from the indulgence that had captivated his men, and
then he had to come to their assistance with the herb _moly_ which,
revealed to him by one of the gods, enabled him to turn Circe's
victims back to men again. The old Fathers of the Church used to
emphasize the fact that this herb _moly_ represented grace, for
without divine assistance it is almost impossible for men who have
given themselves over to the pleasures of the body to win back
self-control again. Men may recognize their unfortunate state yet be
unable to set themselves right. No wonder the Church Fathers
proclaimed the story as told by Homer to be one of the prefigurements
of Christian symbol which showed that the old poet was, in a certain
way at least, a messenger from celestial powers carrying on the
tradition of Providence in the world.
It is a commonplace among physicians that the so-called pleasures of
life indulged in to excess are much more prone to be followed by ill
health than is the hard work of existence, no matter how apparently
trying the work may be. We hear much of hard work shortening life and
of bringing on states of exhaustion in which health is at a low ebb,
but physicians find it very difficult to collect {171} cases that
illustrate any such effects of hard work. Some of our hardest workers,
men who have devoted themselves to half a dozen different difficult
tasks with an ardor that made other men wonder how they could possibly
stand it, have lived to even advanced old age. I have personally known
about a dozen physicians who lived to eighty-five or beyond, and all
of them without exception had been very hard workers when they were
young. Distinguished generals often live to a good old age; though not
infrequently they have been shot to pieces when they were young,
wounded a number of times during life, yet, like Lord Roberts, Sir
Evelyn Wood and Von Moltke, they have lived well beyond eighty years
of age, active and capable until the very end.
The ill effect of hard work is a fetish created by people who are
themselves afraid of hard work. Hard play has killed many more men
than hard work. Concentrated efforts to compress into life all the
possible pleasure that one can secure will break a man down sooner
than anything else in the world. Such a breakdown is usually thorough
and seldom is followed by complete and enduring recovery. Hard
physical work, on the contrary, performed under any reasonably
favorable circumstances, is a factor conducive to health and strength
and long life, and this is particularly true if it is accomplished in
the open. The devotee of pleasure is notably shortlived. Work,
according to the Scriptural expression, was imposed as a curse on man,
but it has been very well said, "if when the Lord curses they turn to
blessings this way, what must it not be when He blesses?" No wonder
that we say, "Blessed is the man who has found his work." The more
experience a man has had, the more he recognizes this truth. Work is
one of the most precious {172} resources for men in the world, while
pleasure, unless carefully guarded from excess, can be the worst of
curses. Though so costly, so much sought after and so often even
looked forward to as the reward for work, pleasure is but seldom
satisfying and is often followed by remorse which proves disturbing to
both mind and body. The deterioration of constitution brought about by
the physical consequences of pleasures indulged in to excess must be
counted among the most serious factors for ill health to which
humanity is subject.
Doctor Carroll, in his "Mastery of Nervousness", says very well, "the
danger of overwork is far less common than that of underwork.... Close
observation brings the conviction that the great majority claiming
overwork as the reason for their nervous deficiency are the victims
not of earnest productive work itself but of defective methods of work
discounted by haste, stress and strain, by impatience, worry and
fear." In a word nervous breakdown, when it comes to a busy man or
woman, is due ever so much more to the irritable state of mind into
which they get in the midst of their press of work than to the work
itself. The feeling of haste is ever so much more dangerous than the
actual hurry. The mistakes that are made under these circumstances are
great wasters of time and of energy and disturbers of morale, until a
feeling of impotence grows on one and then becomes inveterate. As a
matter of fact a great many people who break down do so not during the
stress of work but afterwards, when they have the leisure to look back
on it and think about it and wonder why they did not break down, and
while their friends keep sympathizing with them and they have the
chance to let their self-pity cause the crumpling of their character.
{173}
Premature old age, that is, the precocious hardening of the arteries,
for "a man is as old as his arteries", came particularly, the older
physicians used to say, to the devotees of the three pagan deities,
Venus, Bacchus and Vulcan. That is, senility came before it was due in
the order of nature to those who indulged in venery or in wine and its
almost inevitable accompaniment, overeating, and then to the man who
did such hard physical work as the blacksmith does, for Vulcan, it may
be recalled, was the blacksmith among the gods. In this enumeration
two out of three of the factors unfavorable for health come from the
pleasures of life; but I think there is no doubt in the minds of
physicians that if a comparison in the number of patients whose
ailments were the consequences of the worship of the deities named
were to be made, there would be found ten times as many men who became
prematurely old or suffered from the development of organic affections
because of wine and venereal disease as from hard physical labor.
Aneurysm is the one form of arterial degeneration to which the hard
worker is particularly liable, and the more we have learned of that
the more we have come to realize very clearly that while the hard work
was the immediate occasion, the real underlying cause of the
degeneration of arteries that led to the development of the aneurysm
was to be found in some overindulgence. The French physicians
sometimes said satirically that overwork of the heart much more than
of the head or the hands laid the foundation on which aneurysm
developed, for it occurs oftenest on a luetic basis.
Practically all the degenerative diseases affecting heart, arteries,
kidneys and brain are due to excesses. The excesses of life are
counted by religion among the deadly {174} sins. Pride, anger,
covetousness, lust, gluttony, envy and sloth,--all these represent
indulgence in evil passions that very readily affect the body.
Religion has constantly used all its influence to overcome them and
has succeeded better than any other single factor in life. It is
perfectly possible to have a veneer of religion and be a miser or a
glutton or a very devil of pride, but real religion of the heart,
while it does not eradicate the tendency that exists in human nature
toward these unfortunate qualities, helps the possessor of them
materially to control them and to keep his passions in subjection.
In this control of excesses religion has been an extremely important
factor for health. It is true that many other factors, human respect,
worldly consideration, preservation of one's own dignity and similar
non-religious factors have had a like influence. Occasionally indeed
it would seem as though mere respectability had more to do with
preventing men and women from making exhibitions of themselves by the
public commission of sin than even religion itself. This would appear
to be surely true if different strata of society were compared with
each other. If, for instance, the working classes who practice their
religion and the better-to-do classes who perhaps neglect it were to
be compared in these regards, the contrast would favor the latter as a
rule, but any such comparison would be eminently odious. There is no
doubt that mere human motives can be effective, but the value of
religion should be gauged from its effect on people who are living in
the same circumstance. The vast majority of the very poor have found
religion a sheet anchor of veritable salvation under circumstances
where sin would have been not only not a disadvantage but actually
have proved of material benefit to them. While, on the other hand,
many {175} a well-to-do person lacking religion has fallen into sin in
spite of the fact that every human motive spoke emphatically against
their commission of it.
Religion has been particularly helpful in the neutralization of
temptations to excess in the matter of alcoholic liquor. Father
Matthew's great crusade in Ireland, England and this country enlisted
millions of people under the banner of temperance and helped
marvelously in enabling the world to understand that the serious evils
connected with the liquor traffic were by no means inevitable, but
could be repressed to a great extent by simple personal appeals which
called to the manhood of men and made them understand their own power
to throw off the shackles of what to them seemed an unconquerable
habit by a serious act of the will. The immense amount of suffering
that was thus saved to the women and children of men who had been
accustomed to drink a considerable portion or sometimes practically
all of their wages and leave their families to get on as best they
might is almost incalculable.
A still more important result of Father Matthew's work was the
demonstration that men who are the victims of even such a habit and
craving as that which is produced by indulgence in liquor may break it
completely by a single powerful act of the will, when to that is added
the strong suggestion that they will surely be helped by divine favor
to accomplish what they have purposed. Literally hundreds of thousands
of men under Father Matthew's inspiration, and touched by the example
of others around them, broke off once and for all from liquor habits
to which they had been enslaved sometimes for years.
Professor William James in his essay on the "Energies of Men" first
published in the _American Magazine_ under {176} the title of "Powers
of Men" (October, 1907)--it was originally the presidential address
delivered before the American Philosophical Association and therefore
written not for popular reading, but as a serious contribution to
science--has on this, as on many other subjects, a paragraph that is
valuable in this regard. It is not only interesting but is eminently
suggestive with regard to the effect that can be produced on a man by
deep emotion, and when that emotion is based on profound religious
feeling it can be not only immediate but extremely enduring in its
effect. This is what proved to be the case for the vast majority of
those who took the pledge from Father Matthew.
Professor James said: "The normal opener of deeper and deeper levels
of energy is the will. The difficulty is to use it, to make the effort
which the word volition implies. But if we do make it (or if a god,
though he were only the god Chance, makes it through us), it will act
dynamogenically on us for a month. It is notorious that a single
successful effort of moral volition, such as saying 'no' to some
habitual temptation, or performing some courageous act will launch a
man on a higher level of energy for days and weeks, will give him a
new range of power. 'In the act of uncorking the whiskey bottle which
I had brought home to get drunk upon,' said a man to me, 'I suddenly
found myself running out into the garden, where I smashed it on the
ground. I felt so happy and uplifted after this act, that for two
months I wasn't tempted to touch a drop.'"
Nothing is so capable of giving a fillip to a sluggish will, arousing
it to efforts that even its possessor never dreamt it capable of, as
religion. The change of life known as conversion has not infrequently
revolutionized an existence that seemed hopelessly and helplessly
committed {177} to the baser aims of living. Instances are in every
one's experience, and the veriest self-missioned exhorter has many of
them to his credit.
Religion has listed temperance among the four cardinal virtues, and
though it is usually named the last--prudence, justice, fortitude and
temperance--it is considered by no means the least in importance, and
the cardinal virtues, as the etymology of their descriptive epithet
signifies, are literally the "hinge virtues" on which the religious
life depends. Religion has not, however, ever favored that complete
prohibition of the use of the milder alcoholic beverages which have
such a definite place in life. Life is, as a rule, too hard a thing
for most people without the opportunity for escape from the tension of
existence represented by mild alcoholic stimulation. At the very
beginning of Christianity Paul advised his disciple Timothy to take a
little wine for the stomach's sake, and in this religion is only
helping nature, provided there is no abuse, for natural digestion is
accompanied by the production of a certain amount of dilute alcohol.
Absolute prohibition of very natural indulgences that are not in
themselves wrong is so likely to be followed by a reaction in the
opposite direction that abuses are almost sure to occur. Temperance
and not prohibition represents the true religious aspect of this
question.
Unfortunately very serious abuses had followed the interesting
developments of modern human ingenuity in the making of strong
liquors. Natural processes only make liquors of various kinds that do
no harm unless taken in great excess and that have a very special
place in the human economy. From the abuses no argument holds against
the use, but it was the very reaction produced in religious minds
against the serious associations of {178} the drink traffic that led
to the enactment of laws against it. In themselves they represent a
great benefit for humanity, for it is perfectly sure that we shall
never want the saloon back again, nor the free consumption of strong
alcoholic liquors which are not stimulants but narcotics and have done
not so much physical harm as moral harm. They have caused the workman
to neglect his family and bring them very often to the point of
starvation; they have filled our jails, have made the need for charity
greater than it would otherwise be; have fomented passion and only too
often encouraged vice, and we must never have them back. Even the
exaggerated religious reaction has done great positive good, and when
it settles down to moderation in prohibitive laws we will set a
magnificent example for the rest of the world, the first hints of
which are already manifest.
What is true for the alcoholic craving can be just as true for
addictions of all kinds and particularly for drug addictions. In our
day a great crusade is needed for the relief of this evil, for in
spite of efforts at repression, drug addictions are growing in
frequency rather than decreasing. We have tried to use material
repressive measures and have failed. It is time for us to realize that
there remain moral and religious motives, appeal to which can produce
almost incredibly strong effects. These can prove effective against
many of the most unfortunate habits of mankind which are likely to
turn out extremely deleterious to health if persisted in. Religion can
thus be a source of power--virtue is the word the Romans used for this
and its full form is not translated by our English word virtue any
more--to help in the neutralization of human tendencies more prone
than any others to shorten life or be the origin of serious disease.
{179}
It would be too bad to reduce religion to the role of merely a
scavenger of bad habits, a sweeper up of the unconsidered trifles
which if allowed to act tend to the deterioration of physical
existence, but what happens when religion does bring about improvement
in the victims of these unfortunate habits is that a great new
incentive is given to life, and men, realizing what they have been
rescued from, may now turn the new energies they have found to great
purposes. Some of these at least have learned to devote themselves
unstintedly to work for others which proves a source of the greatest
possible good. How many a rescued drunkard has, after reform, given
himself whole-heartedly to helping others out of various unfortunate
conditions in which both body and soul were being pulled down to the
very lowest that was in them. Some of these "rescued" ones for twenty
or more years devoted themselves, in the midst of what might have
seemed almost inevitably compelling temptations to their former
habits, to the care for others until their names became household
words in the great cities of their time because of the good they were
accomplishing. Jerry Macaulay was an example of this that New York
will not soon forget, but we have had many humbler fellow workers of
his.
The human will, stimulated by religious motives, can change the whole
course of man's life when his character would seem to have made it
inevitable that this could not be changed for the better. How true the
maxim of conduct in life is: "plant an act and reap a habit; plant a
habit and reap a character; plant a character and reap a destiny."
What seemed the almost unescapable destiny of many men has been
changed by the influence of religion over habits, so that a natural
disposition which by habit {180} had become a personality fraught with
evil for self and others has been changed into an individual that
proves an asset instead of a liability to the community.
Not only in the matter of substances harmful in themselves, but in
those which though good and even necessary when taken in moderation,
yet are greatly harmful when consumed in excess, the regulations of
religion have been particularly helpful to mankind. Fasting has been
encouraged and indeed set down as an absolute obligation for all those
who are in health. Mortification, that is, self-denial with regard to
things that people like very much, was counseled and the counsels so
often repeated that people were almost sure to practice some of them
and many were taken quite seriously to heart. Moderation in eating was
advised at all times, and any serious excess set down as gluttony, one
of the seven deadly sins. How much the religious counsels against
excess may be needed nowadays even with regard to things quite
harmless or even valuable for mankind will perhaps be best appreciated
from the present status of sugar consumption in the world. One hundred
and twenty-five years ago a few thousand tons of sugar supplied all
the needs of mankind. Now nearly twenty-five million of tons are
scarcely sufficient to maintain prices for the commodity at a level
low enough so that people may continue to buy it in the quantities
they desire.
Sugar is an artificial product made from starchy substances, not
unlike alcohol in certain ways and capable of doing at least as much
physical harm as alcohol. There are at the present time half a million
people in this country who either have now or will have before they
die, diabetes. This is a serious disease; when it occurs under thirty
it is practically always fatal. Under forty it may shorten life {181}
seriously. It always greatly weakens the individual and makes him
subject to certain other serious diseases. We need self-control in the
use of sugar; the habit of taking it grows on one.
The use of sugar and milk in tea and coffee is an occidental abuse
that the orientals who originally began the drinking of these
substances find it extremely difficult to understand. Tea with milk
and sugar in it a Chinaman would be likely to think of as sweetened
milk soup. The reason for adding milk and sugar was to cover up the
defective qualities in poor tea or coffee, or mistakes in their making
by which certain bitter astringent principles not meant to be in
solution had their taste covered up by the sweet milkiness. The habit
of using tea without sugar often formed by the practice of a little
mortification would probably result in more good than merely the
absence of the sugar.
Every one of the seven deadly sins represents excesses in bodily or
mental propensities against which religion set up the attitude of
utter disapproval and pointed out their inevitable tendency to part a
man from what was best in him. Teaching children from their early
years that pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy and sloth
were serious offenses made for an early realization of the necessity
for guarding against them. All of them represent extremely unfavorable
factors for health. Pride goes before a fall, and the disappointments
which it almost inevitably brings with it represent more occasions for
depression and melancholic tendencies than almost anything else. The
inordinate desire for money has brought down on many a man serious
nervous prostration. With regard to lust and its awful consequences to
health nothing need be said here, and not much needs to be said {182}
even in the chapter on Purity. We have had its baneful effects dinned
into our ears particularly in recent years. Anger is not so serious,
and yet many an older man especially has shortened his life quite
materially by giving away to ungovernable bursts of temper. Nervous
people who do not control their tempers often suffer from serious lack
of nerve control as a consequence of their lapses of temper. Gluttony
has already been touched on and needs no illustration as to its
extremely bad effect on health. Envy often makes most of the functions
of the body perform their work incompletely because nothing so
disturbs even such apparently purely physical functions as digestion
and nutritional metabolism generally as the wearing of a grouch. The
grouchy man almost never digests well and quite inevitably his state
of mind interferes with other functions. Little need be said about
sloth and its effect upon health but the fact that from the very
earliest times religion has pointed out that the mere doing of nothing
could of itself become a serious, even capital offense, for a healthy
person represented an excellent stimulus to that activity of mind and
body which is so important for health. It is only lately that we have
come to realize how dangerous a remedy rest may be, to be prescribed
with great care, for it is a habit-producing remedy nearly as risky as
opium and never to be prescribed on any general principles. There has
been ten times as much harm done to health by rest as by vigorous
exercise or even hard work. The hard workers are nearly all long
lived, but the sons and daughters of rest pass away from the scene,
not of their labors, but of their languors, rather early, as a rule.
Religion then has been an extremely valuable factor for the control of
excesses, or at least for their limitation, {183} and thus has been of
great significance for health. Religious counsels and prohibitions
have not entirely prevented excesses even in those who were adherents
of religion, for man is so constituted that it is not quite possible
to have all men follow the wiser course. Even the best of men have to
confess, like St. Paul, that sometimes, though they know the better
path, they follow the worse. If to do good were as easy as it is to
know what it is good to do, life would be a much simpler matter. Not
knowledge, but will power is needed, and religious practice builds
this up and strengthens the will so that it is able to resist many
temptations that would otherwise prove difficult to surmount. The
contest between good and evil has gone on in spite of religion, and
will go on, but there is no doubt at all that evil would have
accomplished much more of harm only for the help that religion has
been to mankind, and this has been particularly manifest in the
limitation of the excesses which so often prove detrimental to health.
The old saw of English tradition which in some form or other is many
centuries old is well worth recalling in this regard.
"Virtue, temperance and repose
Slam the door on the doctor's nose."
We hear much of the vicious circles that are formed by which things go
from worse to worse, one unfavorable factor helping on another, but we
forget apparently that there are virtuous circles according to which
"all things work together for good." This means good not only for the
soul and the mind, but also for the body and for health. Religion
makes for health and health promotes religion, and the virtuous circle
is completed.
{184}