LONGEVITY
In spite of the Psalmist's warning that threescore years and ten are
the years of man and that life beyond that is likely to be filled with
all sorts of discomforts, practically all men are anxious to live long
lives. They are satisfied to take the diseases of advanced years
provided only there are surceases from pain at intervals and they are
able to occupy themselves for some part of the time with their usual
interests. It is true that a certain sadly increasing number in our
time shorten existence by their own hand, and at an ever younger age
on the average and that some at least of those who do so are not
insane in any justifiable legal sense of the word, but they are felt
by all to be unfortunate exceptions who prove that the rule of love of
life and desire to cling to it through sad and evil case is
practically universal among men. Life may be, in the words of the
cynic, a chronic disease, whose termination is always death, but most
men prefer that the disease should last as long as possible.
The most important factor for long life is of course heredity. The man
who wants to live long should have been careful to be born of
long-lived parents and grandparents. Doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes once
said that the physician would often like to be in the position to
treat in the persons of his patient's grandparents a {295} number of
the diseases that he sees in his consulting room. Whatever truth there
may be in that, there is no doubt at all that there is very little
hope of a man living long if his parents and grandparents have been
short-lived, unless of course their taking off has been due to
accident. After family heredity, however, undoubtedly the most
important factor for longevity is an abiding sense of religion. A
great many religious people live beyond the average age, and a great
many clergymen live to be very old men and yet retain their faculties
and physical powers very well. They are not longer lived than other
professional men on the average, because many of those who become
clergymen are delicate by nature and only rarely so robust as other
college men.
In recent years the insurance companies have come to recognize very
clearly what is called the moral hazard in life. A man who lives a
quiet, simple life without excesses in eating or drinking, getting his
full quota of sleep and his meals regularly without temptations to
high living of various kinds is much more likely to outlive his
mathematical average of expectancy in life than the man who does not
follow that sort of existence.
Almost needless to say it is seriously religious men--all clergymen do
not necessarily come under this head--who live these very regular
lives and do not allow themselves the occasional divagations in life
which may not in themselves prove serious but which often lead to
conditions and developments that impair health and shorten existence.
There are undoubtedly a good many men who have sowed their wild oats
very freely when they were young and who have continued all their
lives to be rather free livers, and who yet have lived on to good
round old age. What we speak of here, however, is the average {296}
length of life which in men who live without excesses and without
over-solicitude about the future or the present is sure to be longer
than in others.
The old proverb says that "worry and not work kills men." Undoubtedly
worry rather than work ages men before their time and breaks down
their vital resistance and makes them much more susceptible to the
many diseases that may shorten existence as the years go on than they
would have been liable to had they lived regular lives. Religion is
the great salve for worries. When genuine it lessens the irritations
of life, makes them more bearable, renders the disposition more
equable and more capable of standing the stresses and strains of
sudden trials or serious misfortunes than it would otherwise be.
Religion does not change nature essentially, but it lifts it up and
modifies it to a noteworthy degree. Even Christ did not come to change
human nature; He assumed it and showed men how to live. Religion does
not make a passionate disposition mild, but it confers upon the
passionate man the power to control his passions to no small extent
and often so thoroughly that even those who know him best have no idea
of the storms which start to brew within him but are suppressed.
Almost needless to say the moderation in all things which religion
counsels and which its training fosters is extremely conducive to long
life, if there is any underlying basis for that in the nature of the
individual. Religion is like oil for machinery. It lessens the
friction, prevents the development of heat which would only be
destructive and serve no useful purpose, soothes the temper against
reactions and smooths out life's ways. Some one once suggested that it
represented the rubber tires of the modern automobile, but that is not
a good figure, for the inflation {297} on which a man is smoothly
carried may blow out at any moment and leave him to run on the rim.
That is much better represented by sentimentality and the motives
drawn from it rather than from religion.
The direct influence of religion on health can very probably be
estimated best by the comparative death rate of occupations.
Clergymen, according to English statistics which are gathered rather
carefully, have the lowest death rate, even below that of gardeners
and nurserymen whose constant outdoors life gives them such an
advantage and whose simple laborious occupation without excitement is
so favorable for long life. After these come the farmers and then the
agricultural laborers, and then a long distance afterwards the
schoolmasters and grocers and mechanics generally. The highest death
rates in occupations occur not among the laboring classes occupied at
the particularly unhealthy trades--plumbers and painters who are
subjected to lead; file makers and knife grinders whose lungs are
seriously hurt by dust; and earthenware manufacturers who are
subjected to the influence of both dust and lead--but among the
inn-keepers, spirit, wine and beer dealers and above all the inn and
hotel servants among whom the moral hazards of life are greatly
increased and over whom religion fails to have the influence that
would be beneficial.
Perhaps the best way to demonstrate the effect of religion in
lessening the wear and tear of life, thus proving conducive to its
prolongation, is to take the statistics of the lives of those who
devote themselves so thoroughly to their religious duties that they
are called by the name _religious_. They give themselves not alone to
the daily but almost to the hourly practice of religion, and its
influence has a thoroughgoing opportunity to exert {298} itself over
their lives. Most of them live very simply and abstemiously, and
indeed many people would be inclined to say that they did not take
quite sufficient food to nourish them properly and that they allowed
their sleep to be interrupted by religious duties in such ways as not
to afford themselves quite rest enough. They are all very early
risers, at five o'clock in the winter at the latest and in summer at
four, while not a few of them get up at some hour during the night to
sing some portion of the office, the full round of which has to be
completed every day. Their beds are usually rather hard; there is no
carpet on the floor in their cells, their lives to most people would
seem rather narrow and without adequate diversion, and yet they are
noted for living beyond the average age, except in cases where work in
hospitals or the like subjects them to the danger of infection.
The tradition with regard to this prolongation of life among the
religious has existed since a very early time in Christianity and
indeed was noted before the Christian era among the men and women who,
as among the Buddhists, lived in monastic seclusion lives of great
abstinence and occupation with the contemplation of the hereafter. In
the very early days of Christianity a number of the men who withdrew
to live the lives of solitaries in the desert regions of Egypt and of
Syria exceeded the Psalmist's limit of life, though the account of
their neglect of food would seem to make that almost impossible. A
number of them lived to be beyond seventy and not a few beyond eighty
and some of them over ninety. St. Anthony, who is often spoken of as
the first hermit, lived to be beyond one hundred.
It is a matter of never-ending surprise to find how many {299} people
who dwell in monasteries, where their occupation is mainly some simple
work of the hands varied by long hours of reading and prayer during
every day in the year, live to be very old. It might be surmised that
their opportunities for introspection and thought about themselves
would be so frequent and extensive that they would get on their own
minds and probably be the victims of various nervous symptoms that
would shorten existence through worries over trifles. So far is this
from being the case, however, that some of the most striking examples
of group longevity among people who are unrelated are to be found in
what are known as contemplative monasteries, that is, institutions
where there is only enough active life every day necessary to maintain
health and supplies for the simple physical needs of a monastery, and
the rest of the time is spent in reading, prayer, meditation and the
saying of the Divine Office.
The modern religious orders, which imitate some at least of the
austerities of the old solitaries and those who in the early days of
Christianity lived in communities, have a record of longevity quite
equal to that of their forbears. What an absolutely regular life under
deep religious influences, where practically every hour of the day has
its allotted task, where no meat is eaten and two Lents a year are
kept--that is one third less is eaten for about one fourth of the
year--will do to prolong human life, can be seen very well from the
vital statistics of the well-known Trappist Monastery at Gethsemane in
Kentucky, which are before me as I write. The average age at death of
the members of this community for the last twenty-five years is nearly
seventy-three. A number of them lived to be beyond eighty, and as the
Abbot has written to tell me, the most satisfactory thing for the
{300} community lies in the fact that the old members, even at
fourscore years and more, can practically always join in the common
life of the community and do not need to be specially waited on or
taken care of. Their death is likely to be quiet and rather easy, the
flickering out of the spark of life rather than its extinction.
One of the Benedictines has furnished me statistics for that order
here in America, for there might be the feeling that in other
countries life would be different and that longevity would occur for
different reasons than those which occasion it in this country. A
great many among the Benedictines live to celebrate their golden
jubilee, and life among them has been calculated to be at least ten
years more than that of their brothers and sisters who remained in the
world.
Of course it might be said that only the people of very placid
disposition who take things very quietly and are not inclined to worry
would enter such institutions as these, and there is some truth in the
statement. It is not nearly so true, however, as most people would
imagine, for a great many of those who enter convents and monasteries
were rather lively and gay when they were younger; indeed it has often
been said that it was the liveliest, happiest and most charming girls
at the convent schools who were destined to enter the convents
afterwards.
As regards the monasteries for men, the same rule of longevity holds,
and yet a great many of these men were not only lively and gay, but
some of them had rather stormy careers before they settled down to the
contemplative life after something of remorse over the foolishness
which had led them astray in their younger years.
The men and women who enter religious orders are of course the more
serious characters who take life rather {301} placidly, and this adds
to their expectancy of life, for it is worry rather than work or
suffering that shortens existence, but it must not be forgotten that
not a little of their placidity is not natural to their dispositions,
but is rather acquired as the result of their deep religious feelings
and their recognition of the fact that God's Will will be accomplished
anyhow and there is no use worrying about things.
Undoubtedly one of the principal reasons why the death rate among
women at all ages is so much more favorable than might be expected, in
spite of their apparent tendency to worry more, their nervousness
about many things, and the dangers of maternity as well as their
weaker physical constitution, is to be found in the fact that
religious influences are much more profound over them and have a more
calming effect than over men. A very old expression calls women the
devout female sex, and the influence of their devotion to religion is
reflected in their mortality statistics. Doctor Woods Hutchinson, in
his "Civilization and Health", [Footnote 16] has a chapter on "The
Hardy Nerves of Women" in which he brings out the fact that women
resist the corroding effect of the strenuous life of modern
civilization better than men and are not subject to the factors which
have made modern health statistics so disturbing. For while we have
been lengthening the average term of life and reducing the death rate
in general, we have been shocked to find that the mortality above
forty-five has been increasing rather than decreasing, so that men are
being taken off just at the prime of life and at the height of their
usefulness more than ever before, in spite of all our hygiene and the
development of sanitary science.
[Footnote 16: Boston, 1914.]
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The difference in mortality between men and women after the age of
forty-five, that is, just at the time when religious feelings are
likely to represent so much of a resource for the devout female sex,
is so striking as to deserve to be noted particularly, and the
contrast continues more and more to be emphasized as the years go on.
The average age at death has risen during the past generation from
about thirty-three to slightly above fifty, but this improvement has
been chiefly effected by saving the babies and children from death
from unclean milk and the acute infectious diseases, and young adults
from the great plagues of past generations, typhoid and tuberculosis.
Doctor Hutchinson goes on to say:
"Naturally this preserves a much larger number of individuals to
live to, say, the age of forty-five. And, as we must all die
sometime, we begin to drop off somewhat more rapidly after this
point has been reached--that is to say, the stupid and helpless
creature, man, does. Woman, however, is far too shrewd for that.
While man's mortality, after falling off markedly up to forty-five
years, begins after that period to increase distinctly, woman's
death rate, on the other hand, continues to decrease until
fifty-five years of age, beating man ten years; then yields to the
force of circumstances only to the extent of about one tenth of the
increase man shows between fifty-five and sixty-five; and after
seventy proceeds to decrease again."
Incidentally, it may be remarked that the total increase of mortality
after forty-five in man is only about six per cent; besides which, the
race need not worry much about what happens to the individual after
fifty-five or sixty, provided he has done his share of the world's
work. But {303} women pass men three laps to the mile, for their
increase of death rate after the age of fifty-five is barely one per
cent, or one sixth of man's.
The lessened death rates among women at all ages are notable,
particularly among those who have taken life seriously and
religiously. Typical examples of similar longevity which they
themselves would surely have declared to have been influenced more by
their religious attitude of mind than by any other single factor are
noteworthy in the lives of the two English cardinals of the nineteenth
century, Newman and Manning. Both of them were men who accomplished a
very great deal of work in their younger years and who then went
through the serious mental strain of giving up friends and ways that
had been very near and dear to them and making a great revolution in
their lives. Both of them lived to be well past eighty, and indeed
Newman lived to be past ninety in the full possession of vigorous
power of mind until the very end of life. He himself had not looked
for long life, but on the contrary had felt that he was one of those
fated to die rather young; indeed, in the sixties, he had begun to
think that he would give up work, and his friends had settled down to
the idea that he would not be long with them, when an attack on his
sincerity aroused him to a magnificent response that is one of the
precious treasures of nineteenth-century literature and then for
nearly thirty years longer he was a great intellectual force.
This same thing is very well illustrated in the lives of the Popes of
the nineteenth century, that is, during the period when modern hygiene
and sanitation have developed to such an extent as to make the
conservative influence of religion on health felt to the best possible
effect. The {304} Popes all down the centuries have lived far beyond
the average of humanity, in spite of the burdens of responsibility
placed on them, and even the shortening of life by martyrdom of so
many of them at the beginning. Our nineteenth and twentieth-century
Popes have proved wonderful examples of what placidity of mind can do
under the most difficult circumstances in keeping worries from wearing
out life energies, in spite of the fact that the life stream in some
of the cases did not appear to be very strong at its source and long
life seemed almost out of the question.
These long lives might very well be matched from the lists of old
pastors from all the denominations and the sects who have outlived the
years of the Psalmist without incurring the physical evils which he
prophesied. Old clergymen are particularly likely to retain the full
possession of their senses and to live on to a quiet, peaceful old
age. I once heard one of them say--I believe that it was a
quotation--that he used to think that all the pleasure of life was
contained in the first eighty years, but now at the age of eighty-five
he knew that there was a great deal of life's satisfaction to be found
in the second eighty years.
There are exceptions to the rule, of course, and most of us would
think that they are the sort of exceptions that prove the rule. There
is an old saw in many languages which says that the good die young,
but physicians are likely to think that this old-fashioned expression
is founded on nothing more than the fact that a good many of the
weaklings born without very much vitality develop into harmless
nonentities who have no strong impulses to either good or ill, and who
have but very little resistive vitality and die of the infectious
diseases in early youth {305} or are carried off by tuberculosis a
little later. It must not be forgotten, however, that it is as much of
an accident to run into a bacillus as into a trolley car, and indeed
often more serious, and though all that too is in the hands of the
Lord, in the order of Providence secondary causes work out their
destined effects. Quite contrary to the tradition that the good die
young is the world experience that a great many of the good, that is,
men of sterling character and worth who have proved thoroughly capable
of doing what is best in life for the benefit of others rather than
for themselves, live on to be a source of inspiration to those around
them for many, many years of a long and physically active life, even
though sometimes they may run into the rule that whom the Lord loves
he chastens, and they may have had many trials.
The Scriptural promises made over and over again were that the years
of those who should keep His word should be long in the land. That
promise has been fulfilled so often as to make it a commonplace. Three
hundred years ago Shakespeare summed up at least the physical effects
of keeping the law when he had old Adam say in "As You Like It":
"Though I look old, yet I am strong and lusty;
For in my youth I never did apply
Hot and rebellious liquors in my blood;
Nor did not with unbashful forehead woo
The means of weakness and debility;
Therefore my age is as a lusty winter.
Frosty, but kindly. Let me go with you:
I'll do the service of a younger man
In all your business and necessities."
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