UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES NERVES AND THE WAR NERVES AND THE WAR BY ANNIE PAYSON CALL " To get a true idea of real non-resistance, we must begin by associating it with all the qualities that make for strength." ABTHUB A. CABEY, in " New Nerves for Old." BOSTON LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 1918 Copyright, 1918, BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY All rights reserved ^ J fcA 7<1 O C i2 -vie CONTENTS CHAPTER PAQH 1 THE LAW 1 2 " CONQUER BEGINNINGS " . . . .17 j. 3 "THE OTHER MAN" 33 N 4 IN A HOSPITAL 51 ^ N 5 ABOUT SUFFERING ..... 66 6 THE POWER OF CLEANNESS ... 80 7 SHELL SHOCK 93 8 THE WILL TO USE THE BAYONET . .123 4 9 DEATH AND DYING 137 10 COURAGE 152 V THE HEART OF GOOD HEALTH . 169 NERVES AND THE WAR CHAPTER 1 The Law NERVES have everything to do with the war. A man cannot move a finger without a nerve to take the message from the brain to the muscles ; certainly he cannot fire a gun, or even aim it. And a man who cannot use his nerves as they should be used, to direct his muscles as they should be directed, is not equipped to the limit of his best possible power, either for fighting himself or for guiding and training other men to fight. Not many men to-day are so equipped. True, we speak commonly of a man i NERVES AND THE WAR having "nerve." But if you say that a man has "nerve", the meaning is generally taken to be that a man has grit, has courage sometimes that he has too much presumption in deal- ing with other men. Never, I take it, does it mean that he has permanent and well-balanced self-control, but only spurts of it, and that generally for a selfish end of his own. A man with so- called "nerve" will prove as weak as water if you know where to prick him. And often there comes in such a man's life a time and place where Fate, if we may call it that, does prick him, and then the man of "nerve" goes to pieces and has "nerves." It seems a great pity that "nerves" should stand for what is unhealthy, unwholesome, and even at times de- generate. For "nerves" are the great- est blessing a man can have in this 2 THE LAW whole world. In themselves they are the symbols of all that is useful, in- teresting, and healthy. Nerves are the connecting link between this world and the other. Nerves touch a man's body on one side and his soul on the other. Nerves are the channel over which a man's energy travels. Therefore the true management of nerves is literally the true management of the whole man by himself. And you cannot manage a German until you have managed your- self. In order to conquer yourself you need two things : first, saving or conserving power, which you will find comes from physical and mental relaxation at such times as your body and mind are off duty ; and, second, directing power, which will come from concentration toward the particular job at hand when body and mind are on duty. It is easy to see 3 NERVES AND THE WAR that these two forces are reciprocal. Re- laxation while you are at a rest billet will simply afford you so much surplus energy when you find yourself in the front line again. Most men do not fully appreciate that true will-power is the source of these two forces. A man's brain is directed by his will if he did but know it. Many a time have I heard a man com- plain of having a sick brain when I could answer truly, "The trouble is with your will, sir," and such an answer has always proved itself true. If the man recognizes the truth and rouses his will to direct his brain into wholesome channels, the brain responds and gets well. The will rules the brain by in- hibiting its use in ways that are con- trary to law, and by guiding it to act in ways that are according to law. Too many times the self-will is mistaken 4 THE LAW for the normal will and there is often trouble in consequence. It seems a great pity that we cannot say there is always trouble in consequence. The trouble, however, does not always follow the use of self-will in this world al- though it seems as if there could be no doubt, according to order, about its making up for lost time in the next. Surely a man must be guided into whole- some obedience to law somewhere in eternity. By the use of his self-will, a man is working to get his own way, whether or no. His own way may appear to be a very good way, it may be a way that is really at the time useful to other people, but he profanes the law of service by using it, without reverence or respect, only for his own ends. Scientists are forced to be guided by scientific law, but many of them have no reverence for 5 NERVES AND THE WAR the fact. I have sometimes thought that some scientists believed that they made the laws they are compelled to obey. On the other hand, a man using his un- selfish will, unperverted by wanting his own way, moves steadily and unswerv- ingly in accordance to law. Whether it is civil law, scientific law, moral law, or spiritual law that guides him, he allows himself to be guided, and he gets there. For the greatest, indeed the only real power in the world must come through implicit obedience to law. This necessary obedience to law is a strong factor in the healthy use of nerves. Much has been said during this war of the necessity for saving food, money, and indeed all material things, but little or nothing has been said with regard to the saving of human energy and yet the saving of human energy might be at the root of the power that wins 6 THE LAW the war. It is the most profitable sav- ing that there can be in the world, and all economies are more perfectly carried out when the saving of human energy comes first and all other savings are its derivatives. The first economy of human force comes from knowing and practicing the habit of resting entirely when one rests, whether it is a rest of five minutes or the rest for an entire night. This habit of economy means life and strength to a soldier. To this it may be answered : "A soldier fights in such a spirit of ten- sion that if he were to let down com- pletely when he had five minutes to rest in safety, he would go to pieces with a snap, and could not recover him- self when a quick call came for action." The reply to that statement is that any soldier fighting in such a spirit of tension, when his five minutes' rest came, 7 NERVES AND THE WAR could not let himself down if he tried. A man must have the normal habit of true economy of force back of him to be able to let down and rest in five minutes and then recover himself at once for quick and decisive action. Kipling gave this peculiar power of rest- ing to his pony in the polo game, "The Maltese Cat." The "Maltese Cat" says when he comes off the field, "'Now leave me alone. I must get all the rest I can before the last quarter. ' "He hung down his head and let all his muscles go slack, Shikast, Bamboo, and Who's Who copying his example. "Better not watch the game,' he said. 'We aren't playing, and we shall only take it out of ourselves if we grow anx- ious. Look at the ground and pretend it's fly -time.' 'They did their best, but it was hard advice to follow." 8 THE LAW Any intelligent soldier reading the above little bit from the story of the "Maltese Cat" could get from it in- valuable help in the performance of his work; and the Maltese Cat, if I re- member rightly, won the game. If we can rest when the time comes for resting, even in war, we have then a true background from which to learn economy of effort in everything we do from cleaning the captain's puttees to a charge with the bayonet. To rest truly, we must learn to give up when the time comes to give up. Drop the pictures out of our minds. Drop the anxieties as to what to do next. Drop our muscles so that our bodies are literally given up to gravity in every muscle. We need not be afraid ; everything we want to use will be there, and be there ready for use when our rest is over and the time comes NERVES AND THE WAR for action. Most men suffer unneces- sarily because they do not trust in the laws of nature. There always seems to be a sort of latent fear that the laws will go back on them, which is an impossi- bility. Indeed, men, because they have no faith, too often go back on the laws. So much for the economy of relaxation. The second economy, as I said before, is in using only the force and the part of one's body that is needed to do what- ever is before one to do the economy of concentration. That is to learn to do all one's work without strain. The forming of that habit must be begun out of hours. But one man who has gained it can help many another during action by a quick and kind suggestion as op- portunity offers. It would be an easy objection, and one that might sound reasonable, to say : 10 THE LAW "How can I waste my time thinking to do a thing with the least amount of force? The enemy would get the better of me at once while I was aiming to economize in getting the better of him. I must be alert, keen, quick, sharp, everything I do must go with a 'click." It does seem absurd on first thought to say that one can "click" with econ- omy of force, but on second thought it is easy to see that the greater the economy of energy, the better concen- trated is the "click." True concentra- tion is dropping everything that inter- feres. One must not stop to consider the true economy in the "click", but by considering, in leisure times, the true economy in all action, the brain gets turned into that direction, and as econ- omy of force becomes habitual in much that can be done at leisure, the habit ii NERVES AND THE WAR gradually spreads itself to the things that must be done with immediate promptness. This economy of concentration is a principle a working law in nature. Adam, if there ever was a personal Adam, anyway, Adam, as being typical of a perfectly natural man, would have obeyed it to perfection, before he left Paradise, for when he left he had to learn laboriously all that before then he would have done as a matter of course. So must any other man, by the use of his own free will, work his way into the current of perfect law until he consciously forms habits which enable him to be carried by such law, and so to be steadily en- lightened and guided. Let me repeat what I have trieii to make clear in this chapter : There is a law of human economy 12 THE LAW which dictates that a man can increase his mental and physical efficiency if he will rest while off duty and concentrate, to the elimination of everything except the particular duty at hand, at other times. Absolute obedience to this law is essential if a man would reap its benefits. True will power makes for obedience, selfish will power defeats it. If a man wills that he drop his thoughts of himself, self-pity, self -appreciation, self-aggrandizement, and all the rest of the brood, he will find it easy to con- serve while at rest and concentrate while at work ; he will find himself a small working unit in the mass of human econ- omy; he will find that he has attained the only "selfish" thing worth having self-control. In our blind foolishness, we grope around in darkness when we might so easily slip into the light. We aim labori- 13 NERVES AND THE WAR ously to make a fire with steel and flint when the whole blessed sun is at our disposal ; at our disposal it is, provided we obey its laws. The trouble is that man does not like to obey. He wants to use his will and his human machine according to his own ideas, and not at all according to God's laws. Man's own ideas, regardless of law, are always even- tually destructive, however good they may appear to be temporarily; but God's laws, when truly obeyed, are, without fail, always constructive. There is no law of mechanics that is not exemplified in the working of the human machine. The balance of a lever is a beautiful thing, and one can easily see the absurdity of adjusting a lever so that it would be able to raise a weight and then putting on additional and unnecessary force. To use un- necessary force so as to produce waste 14 THE LAW of energy is not mechanically desirable, but to use the laws of nature to econo- mize force is that for which a true mechanic is always aiming. A little thoughtful, intelligent use of the mind in studying true economy in nerve force, and a little will power exerted in its practice, will bring us into the normal working of the laws of human action, so that before we know it we shall feel as if our nerve machine had been oiled. And our steady unfailing reward will be greater efficiency in doing the work which has been set before us. Man is the only animal who can get up and look down on himself and see what he is doing, how he is doing it, and why he is doing it. Man is the only animal who can get a perspective within himself. If we took advantage, an honest advantage of that privilege, NERVES AND THE WAR it would bring us freedom, delicacy of perception, and power for a man's very identity is his power of distin- guishing and his power of choosing. The measure of his use of that power of choosing is his measure as a man. 16 CHAPTER 2 "Conquer Beginnings" THERE is really nothing new in the chapters which follow. I have already stated the case, and in a way, nothing more can be said. But consider, for a moment, the multi- plicity of man's experiences in this war. How one man is a messboy on a de- stroyer hunting submarines ; how an- other is an ambulance driver ; how a third is a great general outlining cam- paigns which involve thousands of his fellows ; how a fourth sits at a desk cod- ing dispatches and keeping lines of com- munication open ; how hundreds and thousands of others sit on a firing step up to their knees in slush, and wait ; how 17 NERVES AND THE WAR thousands and hundreds of thousands of others are obeying their superiors, doing their several duties in ways too manifold to chronicle or even contem- plate. Or again, consider the simple yet vast difference between being a private and being an officer; consider the difference between mental agony, which some men are asked to suffer, and the physical agony which is the lot of others ; consider the fact that some men are born clean while others have to keep so ; that some are dull and others sensitive ; that many men never dreamed that they would be called upon to do this mammoth job of house-cleaning upon which each and every one, from generalissimo to striker, is somehow en- gaged. Consider all this, and you will see that, although I have already stated the case, it may be useful to look at the law and its workings from different 18 "CONQUER BEGINNINGS" sides from the different sides of the experiences of different men. For from each we may derive a precept, a kernel of truth, which although particular to the experience of only a few men, may still be used as a help in obeying the central law by all others. My first lift on the road toward the saving of human energy is Conquer beginnings. Conquer beginnings can be thought of in two ways : in the line of construction, in the line of destruction. Both are equally important, equally strengthening and effective, whatever path we may be taking, or wishing to take in the line of useful work, whether military or civil. Let us begin with the first the beginnings in constructive work. I re- member hearing a little girl who was about to begin the study of Latin lec- tured kindly by a wise and fatherly 19 NERVES AND THE WAR man. The main thing that impressed me, and it took a deep hold, was his saying in response to the child's ex- pressed fear of the hard work and as to whether she was equal to it : "My dear, Latin will be easy easy if you begin by getting the first lesson perfectly, so that you know it as well as you know your own name. Then do the same with the second lesson ; remember to know it as well as you know your own name, and you know that no teacher, however formidable he may be, can trip you up in asking you to give your name. Go right on with the same perfection of knowledge in the third lesson, and if you do not waver or slacken in succeeding lessons, you form the habit of getting each lesson perfectly. When starting to study, you feel uncomfortable until you have learned it perfectly, and thus you find Latin not only easy, but a joy." 20 "CONQUER BEGINNINGS" I well remember the rapt attention that the child gave, and her sigh of relief. Her quick perceptions seemed to drink in and absorb every word her kind friend said. I think there was at the time a slight question in her mind with regard to the "joy", but I have no doubt that she learned later that every active use of the mind for a good purpose, even if not at first personally interesting, grows to be a joy if we put our whole hearts into learning the first lesson per- fectly, as well as we know our own names ; if we insist upon that, and follow in the same spirit with every succeeding lesson, the very exercise of the brain in such a case is refreshing. The work, if we do not overdo it, starts the circu- lation and clears out the dead tissue in the brain, making room for the building up of new tissue, and the consequent renewal of life there. 21 NERVES AND THE WAR There are big things and little things where it is clear, indeed, it can be- come clear in everything, that to con- quer in the very first is more sure to lead to success, and a well-founded suc- cess, later on. This great war had cer- tainly one of its beginnings fifty years ago, when, after the Prussian success in France, Germany began to prepare for "the conquest of the world." There, in that time years ago, if England had seen that Germany was making her beginning, and England had at once "begun", the war would probably have been over by now, or the forces that made the war might possibly have fought it out without bloodshed, and Germany to- day would be a happy republic. If not, England would have had a trained army equal to Germany's, and a freedom which would have made it comparatively easy to help France and even to have invaded 22 "CONQUER BEGINNINGS" Germany. But England did not conquer in the beginning. She did not even begin when Lord Roberts told her to. She had to make her beginning with Kitchener's army, and of course her conquest comes later, in consequence. Thank God she has made her beginning now. Did not we United States do the same thing ? Our beginning should have been made with the sinking of the Lusitania, or before, and long before that some intelligent person should have realized the amount of work required to har- monize the various elements of this country into a strong, healthy focus, and we should have begun. But again, suppose we had a "Lord Roberts", as I believe we had; most of our people were too busy working, too busy serving their Absolute Monarchy, to listen. The only way was to have been 23 NERVES AND THE WAR driven to it. The result was naturally a sad and unhappy botch of a beginning, but we have learned at least part of our lesson and are now truly beginning to begin, and not too late to help England and France to do their work thoroughly. To conquer beginnings in all construc- tive work means to conquer at begin- nings, of course. It is as necessary with each individual as it is with a nation. Nations are made up of individuals, and if each individual in the nation is making a point of getting his own first lesson perfectly, what a wonder of power and use a nation could be ! An army is made of individual men ; if each officer and private would work on the principle of conquering beginnings, of making so strong and true a start in his work that he gets into the current of it at the first step, and getting fairly into the cur- rent, keeps a steady eye to stay there, 24 "CONQUER BEGINNINGS" the effect upon the army might appear to be a miracle ! In all action, the real start is in the mind. One must always get mentally prepared for action. A great general does all his work in his head. Minor officers should of course follow his ex- ample in mental preparation. Listen to what is said, and then do it is the motto for every private. In learning to drill to obey promptly to fire a gun to use a bayonet do not fail to respect the necessity of work in your mind at the beginning and at each new beginning in the prog- ress of training. I knew a remarkable athlete and watched him in acrobatic work that re- quired skill and precision of movement. "How did you do it?" I asked in sur- prise and wonder. "Well," he answered, "I did most of it lying still in bed !" 25 NERVES AND THE WAR It seems as if certain forces from within came to a man's aid when he gets well aimed in the beginning. Certainly to continue successfully is always easier if one has a firm foundation at the start. It helps also to see that often success comes because through what we have learned by failure we can better start again and make a true beginning. One sometimes fails, it seems, only to enable himself to learn how to begin rightly. It may not be out of place to say here that conquering in the beginning of all constructive work can better lead to con- tinued success if we are intelligent about not keeping at any work too long, about giving our brains rest when the right time comes, and respecting intelligently the restful and wholesome influence of a change of work. This may come, does come, often with a soldier at times when his brain is tired, even fagged, 26 "CONQUER BEGINNINGS" and rest or change of attention are out of the question because of interfering with duty - - where such interference is impossible. In such cases the tendency of the men is to resist, and the natural tendency of the nerves and muscles, quite distinctly from the man, is to resist. Thus the will of the man has to do double work. The man must posi- tively drop his own tendency to resist, and he must take his muscles and his nerves in hand, as he would guide a refractory horse quiet them down and insist upon dropping their resistances. This a man can do on the march. He can do it in many forms of active serv- ice. He can do it better if his mind has worked habitually and with intelli- gence in that way before ; and sometimes this power, which is really innate, will jump out of a man's subconsciousness and he will find himself working to save 27 NERVES AND THE WAR his force and succeeding, while at the same time wondering where in the world his new-found knowledge and power came from. When one discovers that nerves are strengthened by yielding to laws that are bigger than we are, not only they, but our power for well-concentrated ac- tivity, grow in consequence ; it is as if one had discovered a gold mine, more than that, and better, much better. We conquer beginnings in all con- structive work in order to proceed better in active construction, whether it be work of the mind or the body or both. We conquer beginnings in what attacks us as destructive in order to get out of our systems all interferences to good work. Jealousy of the other man attacks us and is destructive most horribly so, if it is permitted to take its course. Resistance to the fact of things not 28 "CONQUER BEGINNINGS" going our way is destructive. Resist- ance to other people's faults and pecu- liarities is an attack which eats the life out of us if we let it get its teeth in. Resentment to those whom we think have injured us is so destructive in its effect that it might, without rightly offending any one's taste, be called rot- ting. Every man can really know his own destructive tendencies better than any one else, if he looks for them and wants to find himself out. Unhealthy excitement of all kinds is destructive. Homesickness, if we let it possess us, destroys our best powers. Being "sick of the whole thing" is fairly murderous to every one's best possible work. The loathsomeness of sights which soldiers in active service must have before their eyes, strange to say, is destructive of real human sympathy, if we let it get into us. 29 NERVES AND THE WAR Every one of these temptations can be conquered in the beginning, and if a man learns how to yield and thus to drop the strain of muscle, nerve and brain that the ugly things cause, to yield in the beginning as soon as the trouble appears, to turn away from the temptation and to his best sense of the opposite good, he will not only free himself from the ravages of the temptation, but he will get a whiff of fresh air in his soul that will add to his power of conquering the next time his weak tendency appears. The same tendency must be conquered over and over before it can be put out of the way altogether. And if conquered over and over in its beginnings., it has no weakening power whatever, and the attention and work given to conquering brings steadily increasing strength. When we open our minds to better things, if we have a true dramatic sense, 30 "CONQUER BEGINNINGS" it rushes to our rescue. We see what the result would have been if we had let the. selfishness have its way and go on to its full conclusion. We see the contrast of letting an evil have its own way with us, compared to the freedom which comes from conquering beginnings. Indeed, the habit of conquering beginnings clears one's human perceptions altogether, and enables a man to put himself profitably in another man's place profitably to the other man and equally so to himself. As we drop the worst of ourselves, our bad tendencies, and positively refuse to act or to speak or to think from them, we find the good tendencies right there quickly ready to supply their places. If one does not conquer beginnings of all temptations, the evil, selfish tenden- cies will work themselves into the system sometimes with coarse and evident force, but often so subtly that they are not NERVES AND THE WAR perceived until a man finds himself in bondage to them, a bondage which often becomes torture; and even though the man is tortured, he has not will enough to free himself, because in the beginning he did not use his will to conquer. A man can think this whole subject out for himself, and obey or disobey to no end. But to all it must be plain to see the possible power to develop from starting right to begin with, in all con- structive action, and the impossibility of working constructively unless we nip the destructive tendencies in the bud. Turn away from them at first sight. Conquer beginnings. CHAPTER 3 NO one who thinks can doubt the very great and radical use that the war may be to these United States. We have been, as a great states- man rightly said, too much like a poly- glot boarding-house. We need to be amalgamated and harmonized, and in our present state of civilization what else could possibly do it but a great war for a great cause? The men in this country have been so engaged in asserting their own "freedom" that they have neglected more and more conspicuously to respect the freedom of other men. The result has been bond- age bondage on all sides. Bondage 33 NERVES AND THE WAR masquerading as freedom. Really slavery in the broadest sense of the word. A noted Englishman who came as an emissary to help us to do our best in the war said he came expecting to find a great democracy, and found instead an absolute monarchy of the most extreme kind, and the monarch, he said, was SELF, selfish interest, on all sides selfish interest. That man showed a clean perception and a keen and quick recognition of human frailty. He spoke the truth, and no one who truly loves his country could help thanking him for it, as indeed he spoke from a desire to serve the country, and not at all to condemn it. He saw that we were not a free nation, but a nation in bondage, in bondage to self, and he respected our national intelligence enough to feel it worth while to tell us, believing that we 34 "THE OTHER MAN" would recognize the disease and discover and apply the remedy. Of course the remedy, to reach the whole nation, must be heartily used by each individual. The whole body is healthy in proportion as each organ, nerve and muscle, each red corpuscle of blood and each white corpuscle, -- indeed, as every atom of the body, does its own work independently of every other atom, and so supplies true vitality for the help of every other atom. The moment one part of the body gets out of order, the whole body feels the effects ; except, I be- lieve, there are certain cutaneous troubles that are disagreeable in themselves but do not affect the general health at all. Let us hope that this country will at the end of the war find itself to be more of an organic whole ; and although there will always probably be cutaneous troubles to a greater or less extent, if 35 NERVES AND THE WAR they are humors thrown completely to the surface, they can be managed with comparative ease. To gain individual freedom, men must learn to respect one another to re- spect one another truly, not to appear to do so for the sake of gaining their own ends, which is a very common practice, and entirely destructive of all true human intercourse. A perfect community is one where each man attends to his own business with a living interest in making that business work, not for his own profit alone, but equally for its use to the community. Those two aims do not in the very least interfere with one an- other ; they aid one another. They can only be practiced by a mind that dis- cards pettiness as an interference to his best work, and to his best interests. A man working heartily in response to such 36 "THE OTHER MAN" aims not only intelligently respects the business and interests of other men, but is ready always to lend his aid when he can do so without intrusion or presump- tion. . Now this is one place where the war can and will be doing good work one of the many places. Most men in this country need to learn the dignity of obedience, obedience to law and obe- dience to other men because they stand for law. Most Americans have had a mistaken idea of being their own masters ; therefore they have been in bondage to their own false idea of dignity. They have thought it beneath them to obey. The " I-am-as-good-as-you " attitude that one notices at once on coming into the United States, whether it is in a waiter at a hotel or in a member of Congress, is like a disease that steadily debases the country. If I have to take an attitude 37 2>JI I rK"S _^ __ k_f : B- J -i-J l O NERVES AND THE WAR of I-am-as-good-as-you toward my fellow men, that very effort of mine to prove that I am proves that I am not. To obey promptly, from one's own free will, without resistance either out- side or inside, is one of the most digni- fied actions of man. If a man could measure the amount of nervous energy lost in kicking against obedience, it would astonish him. It is as unintelli- gent, as foolish, as to throw coal into the ocean when every bit of coal is needed for fuel on the land. Put your whole heart into obeying with a "click" if you ever want to learn to command. If we resist obedience to a man, where obedience is in the line of the law, we resist obeying law. And although many men try to do it, we cannot live and act with real success without respecting the law any more than we can make electricity work for us without respecting 38 "THE OTHER MAN" the necessity of both the negative and the positive currents. In resisting obedience we are trying to swim up an impossible stream. In obey- ing willingly, the stream carries us, and we can work with true economy of force. We not only act wisely, but we save our nerve strength. Kipling's Aurelian McGoggian, who "worked brilliantly, but could never accept an order without trying to better it", used up his nervous force by his resistance, until he was frightened into willing obedience by an almost fatal collapse. He did not wish to obey any one. He did not believe, or pretended that he did not believe, - - there was a God to obey. And as Mr. Kipling aptly puts it, "life, in India, is not long enough to waste in proving that there is no one in particular at the head of affairs. For this reason. The Deputy 39 NERVES AND THE WAR is above the Assistant, the Commis- sioner above the Deputy, the Lieutenant- Governor above the Commissioner, and the Viceroy above all four, under the order of the Secretary of State who is responsible to the Empress. If the Em- press be not responsible to her Maker if there is no Maker for her to be re- sponsible to the entire system of our administration must be wrong." We could, with profit, say the same of America, changing only the titles of the offices, and of course we can see that if each man makes himself responsible first to his Maker, he thus receives light and strength to be truly responsible to the human officer above him. Rightly speaking, the salute is at the root of all military training. It is es- pecially at the root of all respect and obedience to office. We do not salute the man, we salute the office. We salute 40 "THE OTHER MAN" what the man stands for. Above all, we salute the State through the officer. Any man who loves his country and understands the significance of the salute, salutes always with precision and dig- nity, and enjoys it. A slouchy attitude dissipates force; an unwilling salute filled with antagonism and resistance wastes force. The more the antagonism and resistance are repressed, and the more perfect the salute is in form, covering up such antagonism, the more force is wasted. It stands to reason that if a man is very much strained inside in repressing his desire to punch another man's head rather than to offer him a respectful salute, and is strained in concealing the strain of antago- nism, he must be using up human fuel at a tremendous rate and very fool- ishly. I have heard it said that there are men NERVES AND THE WAR in the South who will be disgraced themselves rather than salute a negro officer. Most well-born Southerners are intrinsically gentlemen ; therefore, it seems as though it would be a simple matter for them to cast off their race prejudices sufficiently to see that a man who refuses to salute another whose office demands it, because he is a negro, shows himself to be below the negro, for he disregards the office in disregard- ing the man. A man should with cour- tesy, precision, and grace salute a bed- post, if it were understood that the bedpost should stand for the government of his country. Suppose we know an officer to be bad --unfit for his duty. Suppose he is filled with unmanly characteristics that go against us, go against us because they are bad, and for no other reason. So long as he holds his office, we must 42 "THE OTHER MAN" salute him willingly, even heartily, with the same respect that we could hold for a man whom we thoroughly admired, be- cause it is the office we respect, and not the man. When we can respect both man and office, so much the better. And where is the use of using up some pounds of our own force in allowing antagonism to a man to possess us when we are saluting his office? Is there any use in that at all ? And here is a bit of psychology which grows greatly in in- terest as one sees it work. The more we respect his office, and treat it with re- spect, the more in contrast will the boorishness or incapacity of the officer stand out in the light the sooner he will be discovered and the sooner de- posed. Or the sooner will he get a sight of his own boorishness and inca- pacity, and drop it as he would a dirty shirt. 43 NERVES AND THE WAR What an officer is as a man is none of our business. It is our business to re- spect his office and to respect it heartily. Drop the antagonism and salute the officer, and watch for the psychological law to work. It never fails; some- times it is a long time working, but in the end it never fails. This tendency to antagonism and re- sistance tells especially in brother officers living together. As when we travel with friends or acquaintances we often find out personal peculiarities that we had never suspected before, which are in- tensely disagreeable ; so when we are closely associated with other men in a military camp, especially when there is much necessary waiting with little or nothing to do, the other men's peculiar quibbles appear and chafe us. If we allow ourselves to resist the peculiari- ties, we suffer great discomfort and only 44 "THE OTHER MAN" lose nervous strength, every bit of which we need for our work as soldiers or as other active helpers in the war. Even if a man is mean, brutal, or cruel, we gain nothing and lose much force by resisting his meanness, cruelty, or brutal- ity, i What shall we do, then ? Yield cease all such resistance. We will find that resistance and antagonism to an- other man tightens our nerves and muscles. We will find that by persis- tently relaxing such tension, it becomes impossible to hold the resistance, and we will find that the relief of having yielded to it is so much greater than we could by any chance have imagined that we may almost wish that other dis- agreeable men may come in our horizon that we may appreciate more the com- fort of freedom from resisting or resent- ing them. It is a little like the darkey 45 NERVES AND THE WAR who, when his master found him whip- ping himself, and asked: "Why do you do that, Sambo?" answered, "Oh, Massa, 'cause it feel so gude when yuh stops." There is this advantage also : that by constantly dropping resistance to other men, our brains become quiet and clear. We grow more intelligent with regard to the characters of the men about us, and while we become more sensitive to their selfishness, we are equally open to dis- cover good points in them to which our antagonism would otherwise have blinded us entirely. If we feel antagonism to a man, that is very apt to rouse ill feeling in him, and so the hellish spirit is increased by playing back and forth between men. If we cease to hold our own antagonism, the other man is saved the responsive ill feeling, and our effort may even, nay, 46 "THE OTHER MAN" often does, become the means of start- ing other men in the habit of construc- tive good will. It is a mistake to think that through the practice of non-resistance we grow dull, or that it makes us weak. The truth is quite the contrary. Exciting emotions always befog a brain, and, beyond that, it requires more will to yield positively than it does to act positively. Therefore, if we have cultivated and strengthened our wills by yielding, we have just so much more for prompt and effective duty in action. An officer who uses his will to yield positively in order to free himself from the resistance and strain to which the peculiarities of his privates tempt him, not only brings himself to where his training is more immediate and perfect in its effect upon his men, but endears himself to all his men by his 47 NERVES AND THE WAR vigorous patience and the clear under- standing of their individual difficulties which such patience gives him. Every one knows that in battle a man is most truly and effectually followed who wins the admiration and affection of his men. Once more with regard to brother officers : a man may be filled with a tendency to complain and may feed the complaints of his fellow officers, or he may from the practice of yielding drop all his resistance to what is going wrong in the mess or elsewhere, and by listen- ing to the complaints of the other men with a calmness of mind and not an un- sympathetic attitude, find it possible to keep such a margin within himself that the antagonism of others does not touch him ; and gradually when the men have all had enough outlets for their com- plaints, the atmosphere will grow quiet enough for some one to suggest a remedy. 48 "THE OTHER MAN" If the brain of an eloquent lecturer can carry with it an audience of a thou- sand or more, so that all brains are working as one, the brain of a man who has an intelligent control of his own emotions can have an equally quieting influence on a dozen or more of excited, discontented men. The best working power of the quiet forces has not yet really been discovered in this world. When it has been more fully discovered and used, men will begin to appreciate what real power is. The Japanese have the idea a little, but too much toward selfish ends rather than universal ends. " Moral jiujitsu is not resisting the adversary, but giving way to his pressure, that he may the better trip him up and confound him." This is better read "not resisting the adversary, but giving way to his pressure that he may the better prove the best 49 NERVES AND THE WAR working of the moral law." To conquer, conquer by yielding is the best and truest way for individual work. We are really yielding to law and not to our opponent, and such individual conquer- ing makes the best possible soldier in a war of force. The Other Man is the most important individual in the world. That is the basis of Christianity, which is what we are fighting for in this war. If Every Man will learn to forget himself and remember the Other Man, we shall not have to fight very much longer. Re- member the Other Man. CHAPTER 4 In a Hospital IN a hospital, if the nurses are well trained, truly focussed to their work, clear-headed, sympathetic and yet without false sympathy, if the pa- tients are obedient and responsive, of course the work tends steadily and en- tirely toward health. We are not here unmindful of the doctors ; we are taking it for granted that they are all right. Let us speak first of the patients; then if a man should happen to read this book who later comes into a hospital, enough of the light here may remain with him to help him through and out of the hospital in quicker time than would be otherwise possible, and perhaps may even NERVES AND THE WAR enable him to be of use to the man in the next bed. One who is ill can lie quiet and endure his suffering without a word of com- plaint, but at the same time he can be holding himself so tensely that his cir- culation is interfered with, and the cura- tive power of nature and the remedies given to him are constantly interrupted. In many, many cases a brave, un- complaining man does endure in that way, and he endures thus because he knows no other way. No one has taught him ; it has never been suggested to him. His grandfathers and grand- mothers endured just like that before, and every one said of them as they say of the grandson, "How beautiful ! What wonderful endurance ! What a monu- ment of patience!" This is said over and over, and no one knows that while such a man is indeed in all appearance a 52 IN A HOSPITAL monument of patience, he is at the same time a monstrosity of strain. This "monument of patience" is wrong because his strain delays his recovery more than if he cried out and com- plained and swore at his nurses. Either extreme is decidedly undesirable, but the crying out at least gives an outlet and starts the circulation toward a healthy movement in the beginning, although if carried too far, it can lead to inflamma- tion. But with a quiet endurance which accompanies an interested insistence of the will upon dropping strain, we bring all the good and wholesome forces that tend toward health directly to our aid. Let me give a simple illustration. A man was way up in the north of England visiting for the first time a friend whose family he had never met before. His visit was to be for only a few days be- cause his passage was taken on a steamer 53 NERVES AND THE WAR to sail for home in a week. It was es- sential that he should reach home at the time when the steamer was due, and, although this last may seem to be a minor matter, for reasons of his own which to him seemed very important, the man was desperately homesick. All at once, and without any warning, this man was taken suddenly with a severe form of grippe. What came to him first was, "I am in a stranger's house ; what right have I to be ill here ?" That caused the tightening of his nerves, Number 1. Then came rushing on him what seemed to be the very evident fact: "Feeling as ill as I do now, how can I possibly expect to be able to reach Liverpool and sail for home in a week?" There was the cause Number 2 of tightening of the nerves ; in that was the knowledge of the essential need of his being at home, and the extreme horne- 54 IN A HOSPITAL sickness which was a sort of torture. The cause of tightening Number 2 seemed colossal and overwhelming. Our friend had about an hour of that, and of course his fever was increasing and he himself was feeling proportionately ill, when it occurred to him that all his anxieties were increasing his illness. He called himself names and said to himself, "Now look here, John ; if you go on this way, you have no chance at all. You have heard of the curative power of yielding. Now is your opportunity to prove its truth, and your only possible way of being able to sail." Whereupon he put his whole will, shall I say all the strength of his character, to work to make himself willing not to sail. "All right, all right," he repeated over and over to himself, "I am willing to stay here in bed and let the boat go without me. All right, all right; if things go 55 NERVES AND THE WAR to smash, it is not my fault if I am tied down here and cannot move. It is my fault if I do not do everything in my power to yield in muscle and nerve so that nature can make full use of the one chance." And he did yield in muscle and nerve and in his mind and in his will. He worked like a Trojan to do so. The result was, that instead of the fam- ily's feeling oppressed by his illness, they were cheered and enlightened by his way of taking it; not by anything he said, but by what he did, or didn't, do. His fever went down, and when the day came for him to take the train for Liverpool, he was ready to do it, and he sailed on the appointed steamer. The grippe is an illness which, as the Irishman said, keeps you ill a week, and it takes six weeks to get over it. And this man, of course, had his share of weakness in recovery, but it was a 56 IN A HOSPITAL smaller share than if he had not put his will to work to drop the strain, and much smaller because after he got on to his feet he kept at work in the same healthy direction. You can do what you have to do more perfectly if you cease opposition to all possible interferences and put your mind on yielding for the sake of reaching your end more truly. When your end is re- covery from illness, you can reach it immeasurably better and sooner by yield- ing to free yourself from all interferences ; and all forms of willful and nervous im- patience with illness interfere with its cure. The illustration I have given above is a homely one, but the principle is the same in cases much more serious. Using the will to relax in muscle and nerve -^ to yield and thus to drop the strain of suffer- ing from wounds has always an effect of 57 NERVES AND THE WAR allaying the inflammation, sometimes more and sometimes less, but always to some extent. Also an important thing to remember is that what comes to the memory of exciting associations, horrible scenes we have been in, and all akin to them, is the cause of great strain, and brings or holds the fever. We must yield and yield, and let such pictures go through us and out of us. It can be done, and it is good to say to ourselves we must do it, and we will, and, if we persist, before long we will find things quiet, pleasant, and strengthening rising up and out of our subconsciousness to take the places of all that was terrible. Later we can even look at the terrible things with a quiet mind. But a man must know how to yield ; of course he must, or he cannot do it after long habits of tension. It is of little use for a nurse to say "drop it", "forget it", un- 58 IN A HOSPITAL less the patient cooperates. You cannot forget a thing really unless you have faced it first, because until you have understood and intelligently denounced its destructive power, it has a certain hold on you. The patient would often be glad to cooperate, if he knew how. In the matter of yielding, we have nature on our side, and she, if one can express it so, is only too glad to teach us as we give her opportunity. And if a man will listen and attend to the fact that there is such help for him, he will surely get the help. Sometimes the ability to yield comes through simply dropping an arm or letting it lie heavily by you until it is as limp and as free from resistance as a baby's arm when the baby is sound asleep. From the sense of that one quiet, un- resisting arm there comes a sense of yielding all over the body if one at- 59 NERVES AND THE WAR tends. Sometimes one learns to relax strain through taking long breaths, and sinking heavily as the breath goes out. Steady, rhythmic breathing is very help- ful in bearing pain. I remember seeing a physician, standing by the bedside of a man who was in very intense pain, watch the man with curious interest while feeling his pulse. Finally, the doctor exclaimed, "Well, you certainly relax all right. With an ordinary man in pain like that, the breathing would be about sixty to a minute, whereas you are breathing about six times a minute." 'Yes," answered the patient, "I am doing that to ease my pain also to enable me to bear it." The man said it simply and rather as a matter of course, but it was interesting news to the doctor ; he had not been in the habit of seeing people meet the strain of intense pain in that way, although he 60 IN A HOSPITAL of course at once accepted intelligently his patient's explanation. The more steadily you breathe rhyth- mically, with a constant aim at using less force, the more the deep breathing will enable you to yield and the more freedom it will give to normal circula- tion. During the time when the surgeon is dressing the wound and after he has left, having done his best to make it comfortable, the patient by deep, quiet breathing and by trying to yield can prevent the fever that is apt to follow or at least can lessen it. An intelli- gent and obedient cooperation of his patient is a great delight to a busy doctor. Even the quickening power of giving and receiving in such sympathetic process of curing and being cured gives life and hope to the patient and sends the doctor on his busy rounds with a lighter heart. 61 NERVES AND THE WAR You see that in the process of yielding to free ourselves from pain we have double work to do, for often when our minds and wills are turned entirely toward yielding, our muscles and nerves seem to have personalities of their own and to refuse to yield. If we recognize their obstinacy, however, and persist, we are sure to conquer, for, after all, they are our own muscles and our own nerves, and were made to obey us, and they will obey us if we guide them with a quiet mind. Such rebellious muscles and nerves must be guided always without emotion. You cannot insist upon their obedience with strain; they rightfully cry out, "If you want us to obey, do it yourself" Notice that by yielding it is meant to submit to pain instead of fighting against it and thus to assist the healthy working of the laws of nature. Let nature do her best work ; her best work is all right. 62 Now this attention of the will to yield- ing is interesting, even when the pain is severe. It acts as a diversion a diver- sion which is healthy and which grows more interesting as we find it succeed- ing, and feel the relief of such success. And sometimes when we have yielded to hard forms of pain and made our nerves and muscles obey and relax, we can actually feel nature say "thank you" as she finds her way open to go ahead and do her wholesome work. But what of the nurses ? Certainly a nurse working without strain and one working with strain are great contrasts. And the nurse who can learn to work without strain can bring with her at- mosphere very radical help to her patients. The happy cooperation men- tioned above between doctors and pa- tients means even more in the case of nurses, for a nurse is, after all, the entire 63 NERVES AND THE WAR time with her patient, whereas a doctor can only see him on his professional visits. Some nurses kill themselves with false emotions (real to them) in so-called sympathy. Some nurses preserve them- selves in cold storage by hardening their hearts into no sympathy at all. The happy medium is, of course, a genuine and unselfish sympathy which makes the nurse keenly sensitive to her patient's needs, whether they are physical or mental, and quick to supply them where such supply is possible. There are nurses who weary their patients with their kindness. One can always see be- hind such kindness a desire to be thanked, to be appreciated, to be admired. Such " kindness" mars a nurse's work more and more and sometimes seems to be- fog her mind entirely. A nurse needs above all things to be impersonal, and 64 IN A HOSPITAL a truly impersonal attitude in her work keeps her more sensitively alive to her patient's needs. She is not full of care and attention to one man, and entirely forgetful of another, and she can accept gratitude and affection from those whom she served so happily and with so great a freedom from personal feeling that the effect is only wholesome, and lastingly so indeed a happy life-giving memory for each. When a nurse maintains a wholesome, gentle, and impersonal attitude toward the patient; when the patient controls his nerves with a normal and disinterested study, they are both helping the doctor to cure his subject, and all three are working in unison toward the greatest good that of freeing the bed for the next man. Thus mutual giving and receiving, in a hospital, as everywhere else, is always in the highest sense constructive. 65 CHAPTER 5 About Suffering IT seems all very well to talk of suf- fering, quietly in a comfortable house with your three meals a day and a good bed to sleep in, but how is it in the midst of other suffering, miles away, suffering sometimes of the worst kind and indeed of all kinds. Although the contrast of the places and scenes is immense, still suffering is suffering every- where, and one can suffer more at times when comparatively alone than in the midst of surroundings and circumstances where every one is suffering. A man can suffer more alone than with others about him in pain, because the very turning out of the mind to relieve the 66 ABOUT SUFFERING suffering of others lightens one's own. Then, also, the same principles work with regard to the true meeting and conquering of suffering, and with regard to its actual use, whether the man is alone or with many others. Mental suffering, on the whole, is worse than physical, and there is apt to be a strong touch of the mental, in all physical suffering. In war there is both mental and phys- ical suffering, and very extreme phases of both. In one of Kipling's Jungle Stories, he tells how the elephants could not go into the battle, but could only carry their burdens just so far toward the edge, because the elephants "saw pictures in their heads" roused by the sight of the battle, which made them restless and unmanageable. When the elephants began to "see pictures" and had to be 67 NERVES AND THE WAR sent back, then the bullocks were made to carry the load the remainder of the way, for they did not see pictures in their heads and would even stand and graze comfortably in the midst of the most fearful scenes. Man differs from animals in that he can get up and look down on himself. A man's identity is his power of dis- tinguishing and his power of choosing. That is a privilege given him from the Creator which makes a man a man. The trouble is that man has left this wonderful human power so often un- used, even in its very crude forms, that very few men in this world even know the great privilege of its finer use nor the wonderful human perspective that may be found through the delicate and decided habit of distinguishing and choosing rightly, with the humility nec- essary to the use of all our best 68 ABOUT SUFFERING powers. How, for instance, is a man who lets a bad temper possess him go- ing to rule his imagination? How is a man who allows all forms of resent- ment or selfish resistance to stir him up or tighten him up going even to see the fine possibilities of his imagination? Of course it is impossible for a man even to know the power within himself when he keeps a turmoil, or a fog, or both, all the time on his outskirts. The imagi- nation of the elephants was of great use to them and their masters when it could be used in wholesome lines. The ele- phants can be wonderfully trained by means of their imagination. The bul- locks, having no imagination at all, could be used where the elephants failed. A man can be a bullock or an elephant in his imagination as the need is. That is wherein a man is higher than the beasts. It is, as I have said before, 69 NERVES AND THE WAR wherein a man is a man a child of God. When a man comes to a place wherein to refuse to "see pictures in his head" can enable him to be more useful, he can inhibit the pictures firmly and in- telligently, and they will obey him and disappear. He can do that without in the very least hardening himself or re- pressing the "pictures" to the point where they will come up when least ex- pected if he is refusing to see the pic- tures because of thereby gaining greater power of use. And, on the other hand, a man can feel with the elephants and can let his imagination have full sway, when, if his spirit is wholesome behind it, his imagination will be of the greatest service to him and to others. And the man's free spirit can sometimes guide the "pictures" to their use and some- times be guided by them. 70 ABOUT SUFFERING Now, with regard to the imagination and suffering, it seems to me that at least one third of the suffering in this world is unnecessary and comes from men and women letting false pictures get into their heads and nursing them there, like the two long-faced pessi- mists in Punch. First Pessimist : "Well, it's going to be worse in February." Super-pessimist: ; 'Yes, if February ever comes." The Buddhists tell us that the eyes cannot see until they are incapable of tears, and the soul cannot feel until it is incapable of human emotions. Yes, all right, that may be so ; one occasionally gets a light that enables one to see through a crack the possible state of clearness, of penetration and breadth, of perspective, and even the great possible human use of such a state, but a man must come through suffering to get there. I NERVES AND THE WAR have seen people who felt that they had reached that acme of calm, when to me it seemed clear that they had only hardened into a state of conceited, in- human lack of sympathy. They were perpetually licking their chops in the complacency of their own selfish souls. On the other hand, if we must, as indeed we must, come through suffering and victoriously out of it in order to gain the quiet strength which comes from an unswerving trust in God, and broadens and sharpens our perceptions to serve our fellow men if we are to do that, we must learn to discard false suffering, and to have none of it. Every man must recognize his own false suffering and discard it. It is not fair for one to judge another. Suffering in another may appear to me false where it is really very genuine. Another may suffer keenly for what would trouble 72 ABOUT SUFFERING us very little. To protect one's self and others from false or selfish suffering is a great privilege. It is, however, now only of genuine suffering I write. That is something to be heartily grateful for, if we let it do its work. Surely it is meant that we should be taught by suffering and many of us are. That suffering is a cleansing fire has to be heard many times before we can actually experience the fact that it is true. But when we do experience it, we are not only grateful for the cleans- ing, deeply grateful, but when further suffering comes we can meet it with finer intelligence and sometimes can even welcome it, for we mean to let it do its work, and the words "cleansing fire" have a power with us. To let suffering do its work we must learn in so far as it is possible to detach ourselves from it. I know a woman 73 NERVES AND THE WAR who had an unusually useful occupation among men and other women, the cir- cumstances of whose life, as well as the inheritance of a tendency to painful de- pression, caused her the keenest suffer- ing. This woman learned so to detach herself from her mental pain, without either tension or repression, that no one with whom she was working even sus- pected it ; and she told me that she was surprised in the midst of her work one day, when she was suffering most keenly, to hear some one whom she had been serving, looking up at her with a glowing face, say, "How happy you must be!" The exclamation was indeed a tribute to the fact that the woman detached herself from her suffering, endured, and worked on. To detach, to endure and to work -- that is the secret of letting suffering strengthen us, and there must be back of that another secret which 74 ABOUT SUFFERING is the motive of all, the secret of trust and obedience. Trust in and obedience to the Lord who made us. If we believe in Him at all, we must believe that He is guiding us to our best happiness and that He permits suffering to that end. In much suffering there seems to be a fight going on within us. Forces of good and evil seem to use some men as a battle ground. When the men de- tach themselves, endure, and do their duty, the forces have a clear field, and as "all hell is as nothing before God", the good is sure to conquer, provided that we leave it a clear field. It seems wonderful that we can even witness our own suffering, witness the process of the fight within us. God fights in us ; we step aside and do our work. We trust and obey. If we mix ourselves up in the fight, we only interfere, but by refusing to act 75 NERVES AND THE WAR from suggestions of selfishness and evil, and by insisting that we act upon sug- gestions that remind us of our duty and suggestions of good that do not inter- fere, we leave the field clear for battle. The minute we begin to suffer, we should make use of it. Let it clear us out. Attend to our business, which is to see that it does its work within us. If war must be if the carnage, the horror, the hell of war is permitted, let us see that in so far as each one of us is concerned, all the suffering that results does its work. If each individual, wait- ing and watching, even though at the same time busy with all possible ways of helping, does not let the suffering befog him, but himself uses the pain to learn to endure and to be cleansed and stimu- lated, he can do this good work in his thoughts of and for others as well as thoughts for himself. 76 ABOUT SUFFERING If each individual in the war itself takes suffering intelligently and trust- fully, no matter how great it is nor how much all those about him are suffering, if he keeps himself detached and takes from the suffering its best sug- gestions,, - - then, through the effort of each man actually in the war, and the effort of each man and woman at home working for the war, there will be a combined and collective work making directly for peace, and the best peace real peace, lasting peace. You see, except when a man is raging and fuming, and "suffering" because he does not get his own way, which is all hell, suffering has in it both hell and heaven. It is, as I have said, a combat within us. If we do our duty, and in doing it accept all suggestions from heaven, refusing with healthy hatred every temptation from hell, we are throw- 77 NERVES AND THE WAR ing ourselves on God's mercy, and God's side always wins in the end. It is ac- cording to the behavior of the man who is the field of battle whether heaven conquers sooner or later, sometimes, alas ! very much later. The man him- self must fulfil the conditions, and as he does fulfil the conditions, God does the work. Interior intelligence grows in us as we strive to fulfil the conditions rightly, but intellectual theory without intelligent action is destructive. It seems strange to know that there can be both hell and heaven in the en- durance of physical pain, but no one who has once seen the growth of a charac- ter resulting from the yielding endurance of intense physical pain could doubt that the man had come through a combat and conquered. Physical pain when severe and continuous rouses every weakness a man has, and in the process 78 ABOUT SUFFERING of not yielding to the selfish weakness and using one's will positively to relax from the tension of the pain, we go through a fiery furnace and come out by just so much clear gold. Suffering is a means to an end, and the end is that we may gain habitual trust in and obedience to God. When we see it as such, and use it as such, every time we get through and out in the fresh air and the open, we see with new clearness that for suffering and its cleansing power we can only "thank God", and again we see that man must be guided through suffering to reach the higher place where there is no suffering. Only so can a man be truly human, and to be truly human is to be truly angelic. 79 CHAPTER 6 The Power of Cleanness IT seems, when you think of it, ex- ceedingly strange that a man or a woman should prefer to breathe foul air rather than fresh air should prefer it ! It seems equally strange that any man should be willing to have his mind smeared with dirt, with filth, that is notoriously vitiating and a notorious breeder of disease. It is more strange when we realize that no one, not even the vicious, when you question directly, has the slightest doubt but that it is good to have a clean mind. Indeed, I have seen men whose habits were low and evil seek the refreshment of others whose minds were clean, and enjoy a real sense of relief when their ugly ad- 80 THE POWER OF CLEANNESS vances were repulsed with decision by those to whom they were made. I know a man a soldier who found himself necessarily placed with a number of other men who were vicious in habit and loose and low in their language. This man kept himself free and clear from the bad air generated by his companions, not at all taking the attitude of a prude, but freely con- fessing that he preferred cleanness to uncleanness. He preferred fresh air to foul. He had a healthy hatred of their low ways, and his hatred was intelligent, not mere wholesome ignorance. This man was made fun of, he was scouted, every loose epithet that could be thrown at him was thrown, at intervals. And as his hatred of their foul air was both intelligent and wholesome, he had no wish to stir up more foul air by retali- ation or by getting indignant. He even 81 NERVES AND THE WAR knew that any apparent effort on his part to reform any one or all of the men about him would tend to make things worse ; so he simply went his way, at- tended to his duty, was always healthy and strong and ready for work and un- swervingly courteous. One day, to his very great surprise, one of the men who had been throwing stones at him, after standing next him for a time in a piece of work that had been assigned to both, said: "I wish you knew my brother; he is your kind, and I might as well tell you perhaps you would like to know - there is not a man in this company who does not respect you." Such a re- mark as that coming from one of the loosest of the set took my friend's breath away. He could only say "thank you" and that was enough ; neither of the men wanted to talk about it. "But I tell you what it is," said my friend to me, 82 THE POWER OF CLEANNESS "every man has the love of cleanness in him, if he will only have sense enough to find it and to stay there." Cassio says, "O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains." With what greater force could a man say, "O God, that men should pollute Thy creative power and thus destroy their lives." The creative power the creative power that is the power that men and women profane and pervert in their loose and wanton attraction for one another, and the selfish, destructive mis- use they make of it. The perversion of the Creative Power ! That is why such perversion leads to the lowest hell. That it leads to hell through roads that seem pleasant and delightful, that it leads to hell sometimes with such force, with apparent vigor, is be- cause it is the perversion of so great a 83 NERVES AND THE WAR power. The opposite to the lowest hell is the highest heaven. The Creative Power is not only centered in the sexual relations of men and women, it is every- where, for wherever life is there it must be ; it is in all living things, and it is God's greatest power for use. If we yield to its perversions, we are lost, but if we respect and obey its law with an intelligent, prayerful spirit, then we bring ourselves to where the Father of Life Himself can guide us, and can keep us in the paths of wholesome and con- structive living in all directions. Then a man's or a woman's mind can be opened to see the truth that "If any two creatures grew into one, They would do more than the world has done : Though each apart were never so weak, Ye vainly through the world should seek For the knowledge and the might Which in such union grew their right" 84 THE POWER OF CLEANNESS This is the ideal of marriage, and no man and woman could grow into one while either or both were indulging their own selfishness. And the very worst indul- gence of our own selfishness is misusing and perverting for our own pleasure the Lord's creative power. Witness one great proof of this fact that such misuse never brings permanent satisfaction. It leads on and on and on to satiety and to destruction. It is destructive, dissipating and rotting in its effect. "Rotting" I use that word advisedly. The folly of man in abusing the constructive power of the creative life, and perverting it to all that is destructive would seem impossible if we did not know well the blind- ing, pushing, overwhelming power of man's selfishness when once it has gathered momentum. In sexual temp- tation, to " conquer beginnings " is more 85 NERVES AND THE WAR helpful than anything else; in conquer- ing beginnings our eyes are opened to see the wonderful beauty and power for Use in God's creative life. Our hearts are opened to a deep and deeper reverence for that life, and when once the happy sense of God's fresh air comes to us, though our first sense of it may be ever so Taint, we could no more pervert it than we could dash an innocent baby against the stones. The power of a clean sexual life is shown graphically in Kipling's "Brush- wood Boy." The "Boy" was sent into the wilderness with a detachment of bullies with the hope that he might lick them into shape, which he did ; and they returned in a state of order that amazed the other officers, "singing the praises of their lieutenant." "'How did you do it, young man?' the adjutant asked. 86 THE POWER OF CLEANNESS '"Oh, I sweated the beef off of 'em, and then I sweated some muscle on to 'em. It was rather a lark.' "'If that's your way of lookin' at it, we can give you all the larks you want. Young Davies isn't feelin' quite fit, and he's next for detachment duty. Care to go for him ? ' " ' Sure he wouldn't mind ? I don't want to shove myself forward, you know.' "' You needn't bother on Davies's ac- count. We'll give you the sweepin's of the coops, and you can see what you can make of 'em.' "'All right,' said Cottar. 'It's better fun than loafin' about cantonments.' "'Rummy thing,' said the adjutant, after Cottar had returned to the wilder- ness with twenty other devils worse than the first; 'if Cottar only knew it, half the women in the station would 87 NERVES AND THE WAR give their eyes confound 'em ! to have the young un in tow.' ' But Cottar didn't know it, and he did not want to know it, and if he had known it, he would have paid no atten- tion to it. For women of that sort had no attraction for Cottar, and there was only one woman who meant anything to him, beside his mother, and at this time he did not even know her except in his dreams. To be sure, Cottar was born whole- some and healthy -minded ; he had no temptation to be unclean. His use of God's creative power to build up men came to him naturally, and his rev- erence for the one woman made him look at all other women from her point of view only. The consequence was that he was a heartily good and true friend to all women because of his love and reverence for the one. 88 THE POWER OF CLEANNESS It is possible for a man, not like Cot- tar, but with fierce temptations, to rec- ognize their destructive power and to conquer beginnings, so that the Cre- ative force will come to him only for its best use. Such a man could have even greater power than Cottar, for he would be using it with deeper intelli- gence, and his understanding and hatred of the destructive power of evil would have made him impregnable. He might find the one woman and he might not, but he would always be ready for her. Cottar, naturally, never guessed the fact that it was the cleanness of his own mind that made it possible for him to transmit his power to the men he was given to train. A man who had felt the fierceness of temptation and who had conquered would understand and would prove himself a ruler of men amid more difficult surroundings. 89 NERVES AND THE WAR Sexual attraction is the creative power. It is good and true and right when it is not misused and when it is the servant of a pure heart and a clean mind. It is hellish when it is not. Imagine not holding the creative power as sacred, and playing with it as if it were some- thing amusing, something of our own given us for our own selfish pleasure ! Worse still, think of polluting it, pollut- ing ourselves with its brutal misuse, and polluting at the same time another fel- low being ! It is hard to imagine a man, who has a mother whom he has cared for at all, being willing to destroy the life of an- other woman or to take his share in such mutual destruction. There are brutes, or, one might better say, men lower than brutes, whose minds are so defiled that they cannot see what cleanness means. Chastity is literally 90 THE POWER OF CLEANNESS unknown to them. Then there are other men and women to whom chastity is a negative thing. It is simply not doing what one is tempted to do because one has been taught that it is wrong. Or not doing what one is tempted to do be- cause it is a breeder of disease, and a man selfishly wishes to avoid disease. Such men may live an entirely unclean life with their wives, and consider it all right, when in itself it is quite as degrading as open prostitution. It is the positive power of chastity that men and women need to learn and need to live from. No one can know the full power of marriage unless at the same time recognizing the positive power of chastity. It is good to think what a child could be, what a foundation of health and strength and power for use, and what natural freedom from self -consciousness NERVES AND THE WAR a child could have, born of parents who mutually loved and felt the positive power of chastity and who reverenced with all their hearts the Lord's creative power. The right relations of all men and women lead to unselfish use and to keen human perceptions. Such relations make a man a man, and a woman a woman. If men who appreciated that fact would at the same time get the con- viction that there is no man or woman, no matter how low, who has not some- where inside a conscious or unconscious longing for positive chastity, and would aim to arouse that longing in their com- panions first by their own uprightness, the result of such effort would be more often successful than one might think. Chastity is normal to all men who are not being ruled "by their own selfishness. 92 CHAPTER 7 Shell Shock 1 THE laws that apply to the power of gaining relief from shell shock apply equally to gaining relief from all strain, whatever may be the cause. Therefore, if in this chapter I seem to wander from the immediate subject, it is because the universal ap- plication of the habits which relieve men l " Although the term 'shell-shock' has been applied to a group of affections, many of which cannot strictly be desig- nated as 'shock', and into the causation of which the effect of the explosion of shells is merely one of many exciting factors, the term has now come to possess a more or less definite sig- nificance in official documents and current conversation . . . therefore it is to be understood as a popular but inadequate title for all those mental effects of war experience which are sufficient to incapac tate a man from the performance of his military duties." "Shell-Shock" by G. Elliott Smith, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine in London, and T. H. Pear, Lec- turer in Experimental Psychology London. 93 NERVES AND THE WAR from all strain would enlighten the reader more on the one subject of relief from shell shock. Shell shock is a sudden sharp concus- sion to the nerves and muscles which seriously impedes the circulation in both. The fright which naturally accompanies such a shock whether conscious or unconscious increases the strain and arouses in the imagination ideas which again react upon the nerves and tend^ still further to impede the circulation, thus retaining and increasing the effects of the first shock. Is there any way by which the effect of shell shock can be eased ? Yes. There is a very distinct way. A man can learn to yield to or loosen the strain produced by the shock, so that it will go through him and out of him, leaving him, of course, with a sense of great fatigue, but nothing worse. 94 SHELL SHOCK Let me illustrate : suppose a rubber ball were thrown at a wall made of solid stone. The ball would rebound, and the solid stone would have vibrated a very tiny bit. Then suppose a cannon ball were thrown against the wall ; there would be less rebound and the wall would be shaken. Again, suppose a shell were to break near the wall ; the wall then would be shattered to pieces. Now let us suppose a fog so dense that it has the appearance of a stone wall. A man throws a ball against it, and ex- pects the ball to rebound, but instead, it goes through the fog, the fog closes over it, the ball disappears, and there is the apparent stone wall, intact. An- other man tries it with a cannon ball and the same thing occurs : the cannon ball disappears, and there is the wall, as if nothing had happened. Then a shell comes along; it bursts, there is 95 NERVES AND THE WAR a terrific commotion, and when the com- motion has calmed down, there is the wall of fog, safe as ever. We can make of our nerves just that kind of wall when we learn to yield to or drop resistance to shell shock. The stone wall resists the shock of ball or shell, and therefore is weakened or shattered, according to the sharpness of the stroke, while the wall of fog simply lets the force go through it. So it is with the nerves : if the man resists, he suffers from the shock; if he yields, and lets its effects go through his nerves and out of them, his recovery is certain. There can, of course, be no actual preventive of shell shock, but recovery may be greatly hastened and much suf- fering saved by an intelligent under- standing and application of this prin- ciple. The reason for yielding, with the 96 SHELL SHOCK will, and dropping all superfluous ten- sion is to open the channels of circulation of the body, and get the refreshing and curative power which always comes with healthy circulation. If one yielded and relaxed abnormally, the effect would be toward a certain flabbiness which would impede the circulation as much as strain. The idea is to relax to the point of equi- librium. With any shock of pain, or sense of fear or anxiety, there is always a certain amount of nervous and muscular ten- sion, which is sympathetically increased by tension all over the body. This ten- sion is, of course, increased nerve strain, and by impeding the circulation, in- creases the pain, whether it be a little or a big pain, and so interferes with nature's normal process of health. For instance, if in pain or fear you find your hands clenched, your throat held tight, 97 NERVES AND THE WAR your tongue cleaving to the roof of your mouth, or your muscles all over your body drawn and tight, by the intelligent use of your will you can drop this ten- sion, thus reducing the pain to its mini- mum ; or, if in fear, in many cases get- ting rid of it altogether. There are many other finer forms of tension ac- companying these that you cannot ob- serve because they are too minute, and these may be dropped in sympathy with the other kind. Putting all your attention on the effort to yield distracts the mind, and the distraction is at the same time doing positive work toward health and free- dom and a normal control of the body, whereas other distraction leaves the body at the mercies of the strain as soon as the distraction is over. The Japanese have the secret in jiujitsu, or conquering by yielding. They use it to a powerful 98 SHELL SHOCK extent in dealing with their opponents, whether physically or in argument. They yield positively, with their minds steadily aimed toward the point to be gained ; thus by never meeting force with force, and never for one instant relaxing the steadiness of their aim, they reach their goal, often to the great sur- prise of those who oppose them. Thus one can often overcome disease by yielding, that is, by not resisting it in an impatient or fretful spirit. Nature always tends toward health, and if in disease we do not resist, she does her work and gets her wholesome way. Whereas, if we resist, we stop the clear- ing-out process of nature through the circulation, and induce inflammation, where yielding to gain an open circulation would, as we have said, put inflamma- tion out of the question, by leaving the channels open. 99 NERVES AND THE WAR But how can we gain this power of yielding if we are suddenly in a tight place, where yielding would relieve us, and if we had never given our atten- tion to yielding before ? Of course there we should have a great advantage if we had given our attention to yielding, if we had learned to give up the whole body and to drop the strain of every care when we. went to sleep at night, to lie as heavily as a cat does when she is sound asleep, and if we could have learned throughout the day to keep those muscles that were not in use quiet and free, and to use the muscles that were working with only the amount of effort necessary. All this can be learned so that yielding proves to be of great and increasing power in preventing strain and bringing health. Suppose, however, one had never had the power of yielding brought to one's 100 SHELL SHOCK attention in any way whatever; if he even gets a hint of it where the need is, the yielding itself, in its proper place, is so normal to us that a man with in- telligence will catch at the hint and fol- low it up, making more and more dis- coveries of its power as he uses it. That will be the case unless the man is so full of his own personal resistance and re- bellion that from very perversity he says " he will be damned " if he will yield, and thus stupidly bites off his own nose. Such cases have been. So it is with any normal human habit which we may use ; if we once get a hint of it, and follow that hint intelligently, nature is with us and teaches us. The process of yielding is not only that of loosening the muscles of the body, but implies a finer yielding, such as we spontaneously go through when we relax our minds from tension or 101 NERVES AND THE WAR excitement of any sort. If a person feels an access of temper taking posses- sion of his brain, he can greatly help to overcome the angry impulse by quietly trying to practise this yielding, or loosen- ing of the fibers of the brain. It requires a persistent will and a little imagination, and the power increases with every patient and sincere effort. As in the case of anger: the effort to loosen the fibers of the brain (or what seems to us like that) tends to counter- act the strain of tension or thickening in the brain which is the common effect of "shell shock", and to which its in- jurious consequences are due. Many people argue that anger, jeal- ousy, revenge, or any other form of hatred can be, and often is, a decided stimulant to action. So are whiskey and various forms of very strong drugs. The reaction from the whiskey and the 1 02 SHELL SHOCK Ougs is always destructive and weak- ening to the will ; the reaction from the various forms of hatred is equally de- structive, but slower because more subtle. It is a mistake to think that these selfish and destructive passions are nor- mal to men and can be legitimately used to stimulate fighting. A selfish man will often fight from the stimulant of selfish passions when otherwise he would be too selfish to fight at all, but that does not argue for their normality. A man who fights from the love of right and obedience to principle is likely to have more self-command and a cooler head than one whose energy is stimu- ulated with personal selfishness. His vigor is under better guidance, and therefore he wastes it less. The manliness required to face your own pride and fear and the humility that it involves, although it may some- 103 NERVES AND THE WAR times be accompanied by temporary physical breakdown, constitutes a deeper and more lasting strength than merely physical and nervous strength when not accompanied by true self- knowledge. A man who has the moral and spiritual strength to face and rout, by God's help, --the enemies within himself is more likely to win out against his phys- ical enemies (other things being equal) than the man who is acting in the blind- ness of selfish pride or selfish passion. Such a man, by realizing their de- structive force yields up the tension of his selfish pride or passion in order that the Lord may conquer within him, and through such divine conquest he receives strength of mind and clearness of soul, while his physical nature is saved from strain. If a man can give up the ten- sion which always accompanies selfish 104 SHELL SHOCK pride, he has tested the yielding at its root, from which the yielding to shell shock, or any other severe suffering, is a natural derivative and compar- atively easy. I should like to use one more example to illustrate the work to be done in dropping the effects of shell shock, if we have not done the work thoroughly the first time, which, I imagine, would sel- dom happen. Imagine a great length of rubber pipe arranged to carry a strong force of water to a distance. Now sup- pose the pipe should get twisted and knotted. The strain on the pipe when this pressure of water came against the twists and the knots might be very great great enough in places to burst its substance, no matter how strong it was in the beginning. This is a clear illustration of what any intense nerve strain might do to 105 NERVES AND THE WAR our bodies. In the case of shock or any kindred thing, the heart beats more rapidly and with greater force. There- fore the blood pressure is more intense. Imagine the effect upon a human body with the pressure of blood increased many times, and the blood channels impeded by what we may call the knots and twists of the tightening and stiffen- ing of the nerves ! Such interferences in the circulation are often continuous after shell shock, and are extreme in the case of severe wounds or over-fatigue. If in such cases the man knew how to use his will to yield, and insisted upon re- laxing all through his body, the result of opening and quieting the circulation would at first be surprising, and as the man got accustomed to the good effect of yielding, the tendency to yield would come to him as a matter of course when- ever he needed it. And let us hope 1 06 SHELL SHOCK that having enjoyed the good effects himself, he would be eager to share the knowledge with his fellows. Sometimes one is suffering so that yielding seems entirely impossible. Such times are special opportunities for strengthening the will, for in cases like this one must insist steadily and per- sistently until "the impossible" has been accomplished. Where the suffering is so intense, and you begin to try to yield, your mind may relax its vigilance a thousand times, and the tension of pain will assert itself; but you must bring your mind back to the yielding each one of the thousand times, and the thousand and first time you may ac- complish it. And when once the yield- ing is acquired, and the right habit is established, a man can see that the re- lief is worth all the work he has given to gain it and more. 107 NERVES AND THE WAR The normal thing for our nerves to do is to yield to the shock, and so to recover their habitual stability and normal circulation in the soonest possible time. The elasticity of even moderately healthy nerves is really splendid, if we let them work ac- cording to nature's way. It is the resistance to the shock, and a man's holding such resistance instead of dropping it, which causes the suffering. Of course there is a certain amount of resistance that must come ; shell shock is sudden, and resistance is immediate, and this principle applies to yielding to the after effects, which yielding can be- gin almost at once, if a man can recover himself sufficiently to get his will focussed upon it. Two things are to be noted especially : the first is that it takes a great deal more will to yield than to tighten one's self up and push through an obstacle; 1 08 SHELL SHOCK the second is this : to know that the very force of will and concentration necessary to get the habit of a normal yielding strengthens and increases the ability of the mind for quick and exact action. It seems to be like the centrif- ugal and the centripetal motions of the earth the one needs the other. True concentration is in reality drop- ping everything that interferes. There- fore, healthy yielding up of things we do not want strengthens the power of concentration on the things that we do want. We are depositing a force in our subconsciousness which will aid us in all directions, especially, as was said, in quietness and exactness of action. If one persists in yielding, and loosen- ing, every time there is good cause for it, each time the normal yielding grows easier, and the good effect is better and is more quickly felt. 109 NERVES AND THE WAR Thus we can see that to reduce shell shock to the minimum, and eventually to be free from its evil and painful ef- fects altogether, all that is needed is a steady, quiet and hard-working will and a well-focussed common intelligence. This war has brought the experience of shell shock and many more kindred sufferings to our attention, and in con- sequence all such suffering may now give rise to remedies which in the future may lighten or prevent pain, for which before there was supposed to be no remedy. That is, it may lead us all to the habit of managing our nerves more normally. To-day, if these elements should be carefully considered, and men taught as part of their regular military training to conquer the evil effects of shell shock, it might add greatly to the efficiency of our army and perhaps even to the armies of our allies, no SHELL SHOCK Let me explain again : the vibrations of the bursting of the shell are so in- tense and hit the body with such tre- mendous force that all the resistance in the man reacts against it. This re- action is so immeasurably greater than anything that any man has ever felt before that of course the effect is, so to speak, to "mess everything up" in the man's physiology, to disturb his cir- culation beyond belief, especially that of the brain, and to start a terrible turmoil within him. No wonder a man feels beside himself in a state like that. And when the temptation comes to take all this mess into his mind, as indeed it always does, unless the man has learned better, the mess, having been accepted by the mind, takes painful forms in the imagination and reacts upon the body ; the body again reacts back upon the mind, and so it goes increasing the in NERVES AND THE WAR suffering many, many times more than is necessary. But how is a man going to know enough to detach himself from his sensa- tions after a shock like that, so that nature can remedy the evil effects of the shock with the certain rapidity with which she always heals and cures, provided she is given half a chance? As we have said before, nature al- ways tends toward health, and she tends toward health so heartily and whole- somely that at times her cures may seem miraculous. They are not mirac- ulous, they are in nature's own order, if we give her ample opportunity. The trouble is that we have not been in the habit of giving her such opportunity ; neither have our grandfathers nor our great-grandfathers formed that habit. Therefore, we have nothing in our in- heritance to help us to cooperate with 112 SHELL SHOCK nature. But even though we have not inherited normal habits of obedience to the laws of nature, they are working just the same ; and we, all of us, are entirely able to learn to obey them so that now to-day our ancestors to the contrary notwithstanding, we may learn to drop everything that inter- feres with our obedience, and so gain the habit of obeying as a matter of course. \ What better time could there be for men to learn how to get the benefit of nature's perfect work than now, when we are immersed in a war for the right, and need the best help of every man and woman in the country? A man gets shell shock ; he takes the shock into his mind that is, he allows his mind to be affected by the disturb- ance in his body. If he is a sensitive man, "taking it into his mind" rouses his imagination, and all sorts of nervous horrors are conjured up within him, in just the shapes that could torture him most. His mind with his imagination, as I have said before, reacts back on to his body, and so they play back and forth, back and forth, like dogs in a fight, until the man, of course, must be sent to the hospital, with months, per- haps years, of suffering before him, and his usefulness to his country gone for some time, at least. All that action and reaction was not the man's fault, not in the least. The bravest man in the world could suffer in just that way. Probably the bravest man in the world would be the very one to suffer most keenly, for a man who is truly brave is always sensitive. The fault is in the man's being ignorant of the simplest laws of psychology and physi- ology, and not having been trained to 114 SHELL SHOCK use his will and his intelligence in the right direction. Any man who will accept the truth can be trained to detach himself from pain, enough not to "take it into his mind", and so to let nature do her best to heal and to cure him. The pain may seem to be no less severe, but the pro- cess of cure is immeasurably more rapid. The habit of "joking" one's self away from suffering, which is so prevalent among our men, is an effort in that direction, but there come times when joking does not work. Joking, useful as it may be sometimes, has the tendencies of an opiate; too much of it weakens the mind and then fails in its power of seeming to lighten the pain. Then again, as continual joking kills a sense of humor, a man by using it as an "opi- ate" is losing one of the finest qualities of mind that there is. The fact that NERVES AND THE WAR there comes a time when joking palls seems to prove that joking is only tem- porary distraction, and is destructive rather than constructive in its effect, if carried too far. Isn't it better for men to learn to work according to law, and to use the joking perhaps we might say as an occasional condiment? Loosening the tension of pain, which is the normal method of detaching us from it, never fails never under any circumstances whatever. Singing on the march uses the lungs, occupies the mind happily, and the result is the same as healthy yielding ; it opens the channels of circulation. So it is with any form of wholesome ex- ercise not taken in excess. The in- creased circulation takes away dead tis- sue, and with it all unnecessary fatigue. In every action there should be equal and responsive reaction. When 116 SHELL SHOCK nerves and muscles are used beyond the point where such reaction would be naturally demanded, then when the time comes for a man to give up and rest, the use of his will to yield is simply an in- telligent assistance to nature, which is the privilege of the human as opposed to the brutal mind. It will be noticed always that over- fatigue brings with it a tendency to abnormal tension, whereas in normal fatigue we unconsciously yield when the time comes to rest. Therefore, if we use our wills to drop the tension con- sequent on abnormal fatigue, we are working with nature so she can more quickly bring about the reaction of rest. Distraction, merely as distraction, is apt to have a drugging effect ; the tendency to abnormal strain is still in the subconsciousness, and when the ef- fect of the distraction wears off, that 117 NERVES AND THE WAR which can impede the circulation and cause all the consequent suffering comes to the surface at once; the suffering is increased, and the will is weakened. Whereas, if a man has once faced a cause of pain in the right way, and then turns his attention elsewhere, that healthy form of interest and concentration gives nature an opportunity, for which, one might say, she is always watching, to jump in and do her own work, and when a man returns from his temporary interest, he finds himself better. The same rule holds with unhappy impres- sions and associations. It is well known that when muscles are strained beyond their natural en- durance, their recovery is proverbially slow. So it is with nerves. Therefore, the use of an intelligent will in yielding to the strain, is a great asset, as it is an active cooperation with nature in 118 SHELL SHOCK reestablishing the normal circulation, and normal action of the functions. If one had weak legs, one would try not to strain them where it was possible to save effort. With nerves it is the more necessary, as they are the background of all effort, mental or physical, and to have quiet nerves would mean much greater efficiency and less detrimental reaction. It is important to remember that the nerves touch the soul on one side and the body on the other ; that is, they are the connecting link between the ma?i and his body. Where their action is normal, they need not be in- terfered with, but where abnormal, one must learn to control them from one's own will. Strained nerves, which sometimes come from the deepest inheritance, are often falsely associated with weakness of character, but for a man to learn to yield to such strain and control the nerves 119 NERVES AND THE WAR from the spirit gives him the greatest and most intelligent power he can have. Therefore, the compensation for such work cannot be computed, and "weak nerves", taken from this point of view, can be the means by which a man finds himself, and discovers that when he learns to deal rightly with his weak nerves, the process is a deep source of strength. "Don't take it into your mind; don't take it into your mind!" If that in- junction could be repeated over and over with quiet, steady conviction, not only to the men suffering from shell shock, but to men wounded and ill as well, --the healthy influence of the result of such training would be inestimable. There is one thing more I should like especially to mention, to which this same healthy principle can be applied : the terrible scenes that the men who have not been hurt at all suffer intensely 1 20 from seeing the suffering and the lacerated state of other men. If I say "Don't take it into your mind" and "yield to the strain of it", I mean deny its power over your mind, while, so far as possible, you try to loosen the fibers of the brain and body. And I should like to add that refusing to take such scenes into your mind, or to let your imagi- nation dwell on them, opens the human sympathies and enables you to be of inestimably greater use. If you refuse to take the horrible sights into your mind by closing your mind against them, that will harden you and blunt your sympathies ; but getting rid of such impressions by persistently yielding and so dropping them from your brain opens your sympathies and enables you to put your mind heartily to the details of use to the sufferers. Yield, yield, yield. Concentrate to 121 NERVES AND THE WAR yield, and yield to concentrate. That is the whole of it, and no one knows the power thus to be gained until he has tried it. Power which is useful in many more ways than those I have mentioned here. But these that I have been writing about are ways where so much intense suffering may be prevented, and so much new strength gained that the need for dispelling all ignorance in this line is excessive and immediate. The human body is meant to obey the mind. The human mind should be equally obedient to a law-abiding will. When men once know the truth of this fact, they will begin to awake to the great power and responsibility that is per- mitted to us in the gift of our free wills. When the will does its work in ac- cordance with the laws of nature, which are God's laws, it always has the power of those laws in reserve. 122 CHAPTER 8 The Will to Use the Bayonet IT is simple to see at once how dif- ficult, how almost impossible, it would be for a civilized and good man to thrust his bayonet into the body of another human being and maim or kill him. The fear of hurting another, and still more, the fear of killing another, is so innate in the best of us that the very timidity draws the bayonet back when we would thrust it forward. In war such timidity must not only be entirely conquered, but it must give way entirely give way entirely to the courage to kill. A man must have roused within himself the will to use the bayonet, and that will must grow in 123 NERVES AND THE WAR skill and vigor, if the man is to do his share in conquering the enemies of his country. There are two ways in which this will to use the bayonet may be roused. It can be roused through an appeal to the evil passions of the men, or through an appeal to their good passions. The first is destructive and may fail at any time through some selfish weakness which pricks the evil passions and deprives them of power. Not only that, but think of the result after the war ! When a man, having killed one human creature after another from a sort of general revenge and hatred which have been roused in him, finds no more use for his power of killing, what then ? Is hell going to quiet down in such a man, and give place to heaven within him, without fierce struggles in the man himself, and maybe horrible mistakes ? 124 THE WILL TO USE THE BAYONET In some men will hell ever leave them in this world, having once possessed every fiber of their bodies in a process of what was to them wholesale murder, whatever it may have been in itself? If war must be, and at the present day it seems as if so long as the Prus- sians remain unconquered, it must be; if the whole world is not yet civilized enough to settle the questions between nations without bloodshed, and so long as the Prussian military spirit is alive, it is not, it certainly seems as if we might make use of war to get a greater civilization, so that when peace comes, instead of hell being rampant in many men, a new strength, a new clear- ness, a new power of character will be roused in all. This is what is done when the "will to use the bayonet" is roused and strengthened and deeply rooted from 125 NERVES AND THE WAR the awakening and strengthening of the good passions in men. "Why," said a British officer, "be- fore the war I would not have hurt a mouse, and now my whole heart is in mowing down as many Germans as I can." After the war that man, not be- cause of what he said, but because of what was behind what he said, if he survives the war, will go back, or I might say, go forward still more to where he "would not hurt a mouse." Of course there are men who know no other language than the language of revenge and hatred. Presumably it is of such men that the military books tell when they say that it is good for a soldier to have a mate, that is, one especial friend, because if his mate gets killed, grief at his loss rouses the man's revenge and hatred of the enemy, and he 126 THE WILL TO USE THE BAYONET fights all the harder. I notice the military books do not mention the state the man may be in when he has ceased from such fighting. Military writers put great value upon action, and that is right ; it is an absolute necessity. But their teaching of action will never have in it the possible skill, precision, and alertness that it might have until equal attention is given to reaction. Suppose in the midst of vigorous action a man's hatred and revenge should burn itself out. What would be left? Hell that is so active in revenge often at some unexpected time cuts off its power in order that more evil may result. Think of that ! Are we not civilized enough as a people at least to gradually lead our soldiers to the con structive passion of the will to use the bayonet ? Those who know no power 127 NERVES AND THE WAR except that of their evil passions must be allowed to fight from those pas- sions ; but if their officers are keen enough, the privates need not remain in that state a state where hell can play a trick upon them at any time. Hell has no power within us, unless we give it power, and if we have given power in revenge and hatred, we cannot at once withdraw our consent when hell chooses to change the force of our hatred and revenge into puling, driveling weakness. If we are not yet civilized enough to be without war, we can at least grow civilized enough to cultivate the will to use the bayonet from a con- structive human power and not a de- structive one. We do not kill men's souls when we kill their bodies. If in war we are so possessed, so passionately possessed with the right of our own cause, the power of 128 THE WILL TO USE THE BAYONET that passion carries us, and by means of it we kill as many of the enemy as we can for the sake of winning in the great- est cause for right which we know. If every fiber of a man's body and his soul is filled with the sense that he is fighting for the right and that he must win for the right, then the forces of that right carry him, they guide his hand, they enable him to kill more men in the enemies' lines than he possibly could otherwise. They sharpen his power of quickness and precision and carry him on toward victory, and they never desert him. As one wise man says, a soldier prays before he goes into battle; when he is fighting he forgets his prayer, but the prayer is with him just the same and carries him and guides him. What a contrast when one prays to the God revealed to us in the character of the Lord Jesus Christ or to the made- 129 NERVES AND THE WAR up idol of the selfish lust for power to which the Prussians pray ! The dignity, the quiet, the true depth of humility in the character of the Lord Jesus Christ make it possible for only the best in a man to perceive His power, and yet His power is the only real power in the world or out of it, and of course it is the greatest it is the creative power of God. Let us also think of the way men and women are busy in this world, in time of " peace," killing, destroying one an- other's souls. When that destructive power is at work, we find no timidity. It works inside, subtly. Sometimes the soul-murder is evident, sometimes it is not, but it goes on with a cruelty and brutality that seems next to impossible to one that is observing it. It is interest- ing to think that perhaps the right will to use the bayonet might open men's 130 THE WILL TO USE THE BAYONET minds to the hellishness of hating one another's souls, and to the destructive power of ways by which such hatred finds vent. Much in the world that is so-called love is nothing but selfish hatred because of the selfishness from which it starts. Now let us look at the possible con- structive power when the will to use the bayonet is rightly developed. It is easy to see that skill is increased by coolness or the absence of exciting per- sonal emotions, and in the same propor- tion, skill must eventually be diminished when accompanied by exciting personal emotions, which inevitably burn them- selves out. Think of a surgeon : he must keep for his patient a wholesome understand- ing sympathy, and yet be unmoved if the patient cries out in agony. Through such a cry the surgeon must work with NERVES AND THE WAR steady, delicate skill, not wavering a hair's breadth, no matter how the patient begs for mercy. The surgeon is keeping on in the midst of cries of pain to save his patient's life. Would any man say that surgeon could do his work better if, because of hatred for the man he operated on, he enjoyed hurting him? The good surgeon is moved by enthusiasm for his work, and at the root of that enthusiasm is the love for preserving men's lives. If ether is im- possible, and it is sometimes, that very love for preserving men's lives will enable the surgeon to work skilfully with steady precision and unswerving sympathy through a most painful op- eration. There are surgeons, doctors, and nurses who say they must harden themselves, or they could not do their work; they say, too, that human sym- pathy only pulls them down, because 132 THE WILL TO USE THE BAYONET they suffer with their patients. I call the sympathy that pulls us down pure selfishness. If we have real sympathy, we must want to serve another. To do that intelligently, we must keep a clear mind, a quiet head, and an open heart. That is what the true surgeon has. That is what the soldier must have in the will to use the bayonet. One can easily imagine a soldier with true compassion offering a man a drink of water and doing all he could to help him to die with less pain when a thrust of his bayonet had struck the man down. Even more, if it were im- possible to stop because of immediate use for his bayonet, one can imagine a man giving another thrust to kill the other at once, rather than to leave him to a lingering death. The man who, seeing a German officer writhing on a barbed wire fence, went forward and 133 released him in the midst of German shells, was probably a man who would have used a bayonet on him and on as many others as he could reach, and used it with great rapidity, with skill, and alertness when in a bayonet fight. A man who could use his bayonet with the greatest skill would use it always with the greatest sense of honor. He would, as our friend said, "love to mow down Germans", and when he came out of the battle, he could heartily and with a clear conscience pray for every one of their souls. The first necessity is for a soldier to comprehend the cause for which he is fighting ; to comprehend it, to see and love the right of it, to know that he is fighting for his own deliverance from tyranny and the deliverance of his nation ; and to love his cause with his whole heart is what can arouse in the 134 THE WILL TO USE THE BAYONET soldier the will to use the bayonet. A man may flatter himself in the begin- ning of his training that the timidity and the pull-backs which he feels in his attempt to thrust his bayonet come from the kindly sympathy, the human ten- derness of his own nature. Let him be undeceived as soon as possible. The timidity comes from a lack of intelli- gence with regard to the motive that should be behind the use of every bay- onet, and the lack of unselfish love for the right in his nation. David had the love and the intelli- gence when with delicacy, with precision, and with the confidence of a great cause he flung one of his five smooth stones at the head of Goliath and hit him in the one spot that could have felled the Philistine to the ground. "War is hell," so General Sherman said, but war is hell only when we let NERVES AND THE WAR hell fight within us. War is a rough and stormy road to heaven when we fight from and for the best within us, when we fight with all our hearts for the sake of peace real peace. It takes character to be a soldier, and if the growth of skill and power is not developing his character it is destroy- ing him. One can easily see the truth of that after one quiet, steady, com- prehensive look. And having seen the truth, there is no doubt as to the sort of military training most men would choose. Every man would love the building up of his own soul, the en- larging of his own heart. It is only weakness and blindness that keep all men from working for such constructive power. An officer can do much for his men who trains them from the highest point of view, and the discipline required of such an officer would be of the highest kind. 136 CHAPTER 9 Death and Dying THERE is a story in an at- tractive little book called "The Stories Lizzie Told", about a little boy who was afraid of dying. The boy was so afraid of "dyin"' that he used to go out in the fields and cry with fear; at different times his crying was stopped and he was comforted, first by a flower, who whispered to him that really it was easy to die, for you knew well that you would be alive again next spring, and then you would find the green grass and the blue sky beauti- ful as ever. Then a caterpillar told him how beautiful it was to die, because you came alive again with wings and 137 NERVES AND THE WAR could fly in the air and light on the flowers, and you had such a happy time. The "little afraid boy" was com- forted by all the pleasant stories only for a little while, and then the fear would come back again, and he would cry and suffer just as much, and be so disappointed because the fear had not gone. One day he was in the fields, crying and sobbing, when all at once he heard a kind voice above him say, "Little boy, little boy, what is the matter?" The little boy looked up and saw a man with a shining face looking down on him. The face was so loving and so fatherly that the little boy wanted to pour out his trouble to him at once, and said in the midst of his tears, "Oh ! oh ! I am so afraid of dyin'." And then the kind man looked at him steadily, and the boy felt new life come into him from his loving kindness, and all the 138 DEATH AND DYING boy's fear seemed to go as the man an- swered, and said, "Why, my little boy, you are dead." That story has always seemed to me to have a deep and true significance. For years people thought that when we die, we go up and off somewhere beyond the sky. I remember a friend quite soberly and sincerely looking up into the blue sky and saying to me with a bright and wholesome smile, "Don't you wish you knew what was beyond there ?" We had been talking of death, and it was plain from what she had previously said that "beyond" the sky meant to her that is where we go when we die. I remember that another woman said that her soul was blue, like a blue light, and would ooze out of the top of her head when she died. It seems strange, very strange, when we all know per- fectly well that we must die, that many 139 NERVES AND THE WAR of us do have no thought at all about it, and many more have only extreme and ridiculous ideas, and all such ideas are especially undefined and without spir- itual common sense. After all, spiritual common sense is at the root of all natural common sense. The one can never be really well-founded without the other. Then why is it not perfectly possible, why not even very evident, -- that the other world, the world of our souls, is here and now? This outside world is in time and space. The inside world is not in time and space. It is here and now, and whether here is China, England, France, Massachusetts, or the planet Mars. It is now, whether now is to-day, yesterday, or five hundred years ago, or a thousand years hence. You see, we are so in the habit of thinking in time and space that very few of us ever consider at all the pos- 140 DEATH AND DYING sibility of thinking out of it. That is a power within us which it seems must be almost atrophied for want of use. Many people, very many, would not even feel interested to consider its pos- sibility. And yet, let us think now for a minute, have you not been sitting next to a man in the same room, and con- versing, and felt strongly so far away from him that he might as well be at one end of the earth and you at the other? Have you never thought of a near and dear friend who was a long way off in space, and felt him, never- theless, to be so near that you could have taken hold of his hand? What does that prove ? Does it not prove that it is the soul of the man we are near to or far from ? In the case of feeling at a great distance while to all appearance in the same room, the space between the souls was very great so great that 141 NERVES AND THE WAR there could be no possible way of com- municating. In the case of feeling near, although our friend was at the other side of the earth, outside space was annihilated, because of there being com- paratively no inside distance between the friends. Outside space is fixed and dead in itself. Inside space is volatile and alive. If one considers that question care- fully, throwing away personal or in- herited prejudices, it appeals strongly to the rational mind. And if we listen to such appeal and let it guide us, we soon come to appreciate heartily that it can be nay, indeed, it must be true that at the death of the body we simply go inside. That is where the little boy was when he looked up and saw the strong, shining face of the man, and heard his quiet, loving voice telling him, "Why, little boy, you are dead !" 142 DEATH AND DYING That is what our Lord meant when he said, : 'Ye cannot say lo here and lo there, for behold the Kingdom of Heaven is within you." What else could he have meant ? The trouble is, our finer and interior perceptions are so befogged by the dust of this world, its selfish interests, its selfish anxieties, its selfish speculations, that we cannot possibly see clearly enough to understand inside things nor even to perceive them. Why, how many people are there who keep quiet, really quiet, without and within, for one hour every day? When people have formed no habit of inside quiet at all, how can they by any possibility expect to get an inside perspective? How can they get in the very slightest touch with the inside? Why, such people are never really quiet when they sleep. I said above that it seemed strange 143 NERVES AND THE WAR that when we all know we must die, we seem, most of us, to consider dying so little. But is it any more strange than the fact that when we all know that selfishness is the most destructive element in the world, we do not habitu- ally realize its poisonous power and shun it in consequence? Inside selfishness is more subtle and more poisonous, and yet few have any sense of their interior self- seeking because they have not even ceased to be selfish outside. Strange, isn't it, that we would be frightened and seek no end of physicians and cures if we discovered our physical systems to be full of poison, and yet so many of us go about with rank poison in our spiritual systems, and at times really enjoy it ! There is just the point I most care to make with regard to death and dying. If "ye cannot say lo here or lo there, 144 DEATH AND DYING for the Kingdom of Heaven is within you", how can any one get really sen- sitive to that Kingdom of Heaven when he is not sensitive to the dust and fog of selfish desires within himself that exist so entirely between him and heaven ? If such dust and fog and selfish, material way of living make it impossible for a man to be sensitive to the world of spirits about us, much more would selfishness dull his sensitiveness to Heaven itself. If we want to sense the inside, we must live unselfishly from the inside. No one ever found real spiritual intelligence by speculating intellectually about the other world. Sometimes I wonder if the So- ciety for Psychical Research, with all its many discoveries, has done anything to open the reality of the other world to the people in this one. Certainly it seems as if it had done only harm, when you hear a man without delicacy and without 145 NERVES AND THE WAR reverence discussing the life after death. Fortunately, there are some in this Society who have both delicacy and reverence. Many men have discussed spiritual questions intellectually. Many men are glib in expressing their belief that there is a life after death, and give clear and well-considered reasons why. When you hear such men talking wisely, and what they say is often very wise, they make the truth evident ; but, when you hear them talking with wisdom from their heads, and know that in their hearts and their lives they are thoughtless of others, and self-indulgent themselves, you see clearly that when they come into the world where "by their fruits ye shall know them", they will probably have to lose their apparent wisdom and be taught again before in their spirits they grow to be wise men ready for their eternal use. 146 DEATH AND DYING An highly intellectual man may be an idiot with regard to his soul. To consider death, to understand death, to have any perception of the beauty and power of so-called death, we must go deeper into life. There is no death really but the death of self, and the death of self we all ought to be working for. As the self is destroyed, God builds our souls. "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it produceth no fruit, but if it die, it produces much fruit." Just think how selfish we are with regard to death when a near and dear friend goes before us. If the friend were going to an interesting foreign country, even though we might miss him sadly, we would think of his side of the change, and although we had never seen the country to which he was going, we would be alive with interest for his NERVES AND THE WAR sake. But-, you say, in that case we would receive letters. Yes, I know that is to be thought of. But how do we know but that if we had the same un- selfish interest in our friend's experiences if he left us because his body died, that then we might not have messages from him, messages that could and would be more helpful to us in our work here than any letters that could come from any earthly land ? To get such messages, we must learn to be quiet, trustful, and unselfish. Otherwise we could not be sure that we heard them clearly. I know a woman who lost a very dear relative, one who had some outside ways and habits that often troubled my friend very much, but whose interior instinct was and always had been positively use- ful to her. After the relative had died and those external habits were out of sight and presumably left with the body, 148 DEATH AND DYING my friend felt so strongly and so con- tinuously the help from the interior nearness that she said that if she had never believed in immortality before, this would have compelled her belief in another life, and it would have com- pelled it very happily, for every sugges- tion from inside that came to her, as she obeyed, she found not only to be practically useful, but enlarging to her ideas of how best to serve. It is so easy to see, if we will only look, how selfish it is to grieve and to think only of our own loss when, as in the case of my friend, the loss may be really no loss at all, but only a gain. Selfish grieving clogs the way in us so that we could not possibly get a suggestion from within. Suppose that there can be communica- tion with those in the other world ; sup- pose that they who are there can know 149 NERVES AND THE WAR something of us who are here. Can't you imagine their possible distress when, because of their new inside light they have so much to give us, they see us plunged in our own selfish grief and because of that turning away from them ? Just think of the possible disappoint- ment to one on the inside when the friend who is left outside grieves and grieves and will not listen. To keep quiet and listen and do our duty. That is the first need of all who wake up to the fact of having indulged selfish grief. Indeed, grief for the loss of another by the death of the body can teach us to keep quiet and listen and to do our work in the world from that listening attitude. And such an atti- tude of mind and heart will bring us light and strength to do our work better. If we listen first to God, --by trusting His love and obeying His command- 150 DEATH AND DYING ments, that will give us power to listen to the best in others, whether they are in this world or the next, and to act upon the messages we get. So shall we learn to live in causes, and not in effects, except as seen and understood from causes, and the Kingdom of Causes is that way within us which may lead to heaven or to hell. The King- dom of Causes is the spiritual world. CHAPTER 10 Courage THERE is a man away back some- where in history, who is reported as trembling with fear as his servants were fastening on his armor. When his friends, seeing the fear in his body and the expression of his face, sympathized with him, and protested against his going into the thick of the fight when such fear was upon him, the warrior responded with firmness and dignity that if his body knew where he was to take it that day it would quake with fear so that he could hardly carry it. I am c orry not to remember the exact words, for the dignity and beauty of them impressed me deeply. This 152 COURAGE man knew as by a finer instinct the shal- lowness of mere physical fear, and he could have known, probably did know, the shallowness of mere physi- cal courage. Physical courage may take a man with what seems marvellous power through dangerous places and take him through successfully. But physical courage, when it is only physical, cannot be trusted to infallible stability ; it may be pricked suddenly, and in unexpected places, and then its counterpart is a dogged dullness or a quaking fear. Physical courage must have its founda- tion in the spirit and must receive its life from the spirit to grow in power and in absolute trustworthiness. A man who has true moral courage can always cultivate physical courage with practice and experience. A man who has physical courage and no moral 153 NERVES AND THE WAR courage may shrink in a panic of fear from some totally unexpected cause. Of course there are men, and many of them, with only physical courage, whose comrades have never seen them fail, and they may be cited to prove that my statement is not true. But these men have never had their physical courage pricked; and, that being so, it will be seen by others who are keenly observant that years of such physical courage have dulled the sensibilities rather than sharpened them; whereas years of practice in physical courage, backed by the courage of the spirit, make a man keener and keener with regard to his fellow men, both in his power to aid them when it is his privi- lege to aid, and in his power to conquer where it is his duty to conquer. All true courage should be combined with clearness of mind. Physical courage 154 COURAGE alone has no such strength of combina- tion. Often physical courage develops into merely bravado, and bravado is contemptible. I have known men and women, too, with nervous fears, who had trumped up a false courage with which to conquer them, and had forced themselves to do over and over what they most feared, thinking that such forcing would con- quer the fear. Such men and women are often to be admired ; they do not know that they are cultivating false courage which is worse than no courage at all, and they force themselves through terrors of suffering and the keenest pain to do what they really think is right. In doing this, they are only adding to the strain of the fear and pressing the im- pression of the fear more deeply into their brains. They are also opening themselves to the chance of the deepest 155 NERVES AND THE WAR discouragement, because, after all their efforts and suffering, they find that they grow worse in their fears and not better. How clearly evident it seems, when we face it thoughtfully, that it is a fact, humanly speaking, that we must drop the physical strain, the physical tension of fear, if we want to find the courage behind it. If men could face that fact and act upon it with real force of will, not only would a large amount of entirely unnecessary suffering be saved, but the nerves, through having been intelligently compelled to drop the strain of the fear, would be opened and invigorated by the rush of courageous action which would fill them. I have seen these facts proved in actual experience. Often yield- ing or relaxing from the strain of fear is done almost instantaneously, and quite unconsciously through the pressure of the courageous spirit behind. Then the 156 COURAGE nerves are at once expanded, and the man does his best work. But, with many of the best fighters, the night before, or days before, is where the trouble comes ; and, if at that time a man could know, first, that it takes more will to relax from strain of fear than it does to fight when the time comes; secondly, that if he uses his will prayerfully to relax from the strain of fear when it attacks him, the night before or days before, both the prayer and the new strength of will gained from the yielding will be with him and will sharpen and strengthen his best powers in time of stress. If a man could know all this, and from con- viction act upon it, it could and would mean wonders to him and to those about him. As for homesickness, from which many soldiers suffer keenly, as a man under- stands how and why he should drop 157 NERVES AND THE WAR the strain caused by it, the relief of having accomplished that through in- telligent yielding will bring him nearer to a sense of home than he otherwise would have been. And all of us at home need courage, just as much as the soldiers. We should not only be truly courageous in our work here, but should do our utmost to transmit such courage with real cheer- fulness in letters and messages sent to our soldiers. It has been reported that men at the front have many times had the courage and even the strength, taken out of them, through grief -stricken, pitying letters from home. Such things should be impossible, and so they would be, if mothers and relatives and friends went fully in their hearts with their boys, and with the great cause for which they are fighting. One can hardly believe that at this 158 COURAGE late day when the nation has gathered itself together for its best work, we could hear from any source whatever such an exclamation as: "Oh, don't mention this terrible war to me again. I can't bear to think of it. Let's talk of something pleasant." But one does hear it, and there should be, it seems to me, a special internment camp for such human jellyfish. They should be forced to study maps of the Eastern and Western battlefields, and prick out on them every advance and retreat. Lord Bryce's re- port on atrocities should be read aloud to them at intervals. Pictures of Rheims and Soissons and Laon should be flashed on screens for their benefit, until, in the contemplation of bigger things, they forget the pitiful littleness of their own sensibilities. For, in the first place, this is not a terrible war. Terrible things, ghastly, 159 NERVES AND THE WAR unbelievable things, have happened in the course of it. But the war itself is glorious, sacred, the greatest in magni- tude of all conflicts ; it is also one of the highest in purpose, one of the worthiest of achievements, because it is being fought for human rights, as embodied first in the rights of the little nations, Belgium, Poland, Roumania, Serbia, as em- bodied also in the rights of the indi- vidual of every nation. The thought of defeat, and that alone, can be in any way terrible. Let us, therefore, put that thought out of our minds, and in- stead look for uses to which we may put our heads and hands, consecrating our hearts to a high, bright courage. Of true courage this war is an admi- rable test. There is something solid and reassuring in that, and no one of us but is glad of a big test for a worthy cause. I once knew a student in a great Law School, 1 60 COURAGE who was preparing for his final exami- nations. Two days before the time set, as he was working night and day, an ulcerated tooth took him for a victim. He simply refused to be victimized. He took a happy pleasure in ignoring that tooth. I saw him the night before the examination. His face was swollen ri- diculously, almost beyond recognition. But when he smiled he did not look ridiculous at all. "They tried to get me," he said, "but Til show 'em. 9 ' But the healthy joy of a fair fight for a worthy cause is not the only good thing in this war's supreme test of courage. Another is the fact that it is for all of us, universal. Sum up your hardships and then com- pare them with your neighbor's. Com- pare them with this man's, for instance. The mortgage on his home was fore- closed while he was overseas, and his 161 NERVES AND THE WAR wife and child turned into the street. Then his legs were shot away in a charge, and the rest of him was left in a shell hole, to bleed to death, perhaps, or per- haps be miraculously saved, but in any event crippled and unable to support his family. Compare your troubles with those of thousands of others. The young wife who loses her husband ; the mother who loses her only son ; the girl whose brother is a prisoner, whose letters have stopped coming. For you, my friend, it is infinitely hard, but for others it is infinitely hard also. Look about you and see how they are bearing the pain. Then smile, trust God, and go on with your job. Courage, then, boils down to the task of forgetting one's self. Whether one is over there, fighting, or over here, waiting that is the main thing. Do you know what makes the British so ,162 COURAGE courageous? It is their sweet sense of humor. We in this country are accus- tomed to say that the British have no sense of humor. We are wrong. We mean they have no sense of farce, which is often mistaken for humor. The Brit- ish are supreme in humor -- the force which makes you smile, inside. An Eng- lishman can sit through hours of bom- bardment, up to his knees in icy mud, and still confide to his neighbor, "What a slow place Flanders would be, if it weren't for the Germans." Forgetting himself in extreme stress comes easily to the Englishman and to the French. The British will stand days of punishment of the hardest, most nerve-wracking kind, and hold their line firm as a rock. The French can do the same ; and, when the enemy is tired of getting worn down with machine guns and rifle fire, when his eternal waves 163 NERVES AND THE WAR have ceased through sheer exhaustion and his guns at last are silent, secure in the consciousness that the French, though still firm, are defeated then those Frenchmen, with hours of torture behind them, will wink at one another and promptly start an offensive of their own. The courage of the French is inexplicable. There is a powerful some- thing, an inner fire, if you like, which simply lifts their spirits out of their bodies and drives them on in the service of the Republic. I think as a nation they are the bravest men in the world. Now we Americans have some of the splendid qualities of both British and French. We have a sense of humor, I think; and we have genuine emotion. But we are oppressed with a heavy selfish- ness. It is that which we must conquer. We must study ourselves impersonally, for the sake of a greater use. We 164 COURAGE must conserve our nervous energy when we can, for the sake of exerting a higher concentration of our forces when the time is ripe. We must conquer the begin- nings of self-pity; we must keep our bodies and minds clean and true; we must let the strain of our experiences go through us and out of us ; we must will to obey the laws of God, to find strength in obedience ; we must, above all things, remember that it is the Other Man who counts. It is for him that we are fighting, and for him that we must sacri- fice, bravely, to the end. For, through sacrifice, God willing, may come victory. I commend to you the picture of a handful of Americans on the march up to the first line, who picked wild flowers growing by the roadside and stuck them in their helmets ; and so, uplifted by an eager sense of duty, the divine sense of high adventure, stepped gaily, gladly into battle. 165 NERVES AND THE WAR St. Christopher wanted to serve a man who had no fear. He served for some time a great king whom he heartily admired. But he discovered that the king was afraid of the devil ; and so St. Christopher went until he found the devil, and engaged himself in his service. St. Christopher was rushing with the devil, whose cleverness and power for evil he had observed keenly, against his enemies, when a leader in the op- posite army simply stood still and held up the hilt of his sword, which was in the form of a cross. The devil and all his hosts shrank, trembled with terror, and became powerless. St. Christopher saw their fear and left them at once. He wanted to serve the man who had held up his sword the man who had made the devil tremble with fear. But the man had disappeared, and St. Christopher started in search of him. While he was 1 66 COURAGE searching St. Christopher came to a strong torrent across which passengers needed to be ferried. Having the strength to carry them across on his back, he stopped for a while to attend to this new occupation. He crossed once at the call of a little child and lifted him on to his back, but as they went over the stream, the child grew so heavy that Christopher, astonished at his burden, could hardly stand ; he managed, however, to stem the tide and totter to the opposite bank, and when he put the child on the ground he saw a great light, and there stood the Lord the Lord, who showed Christopher plainly that to all those who were heart and soul in His service, there was no such thing as fear. So Christo- pher found his quest and entered into his eternal service. Unselfishness is that which gives to cour- age both its sure foundation and endurance. 167 THE HEART OF GOOD HEALTH The Heart of Good Health 1 THERE is a training of the hu- man body so perfectly corre- sponding to the progress of the soul in its regeneration, that, as we study it, the impression comes to us more and more clearly that all who are interested in the relation of the soul and the body should not only be familiar with this physical training, but should so fulfil its requirements that, while following the paths of spiritual truth, the way lead- ing back to an orderly, natural state of the body may be made more clear. This training for the body, which is to be described later, is not in the slightest 1 Copyright, 1907, by Little, Brown, and Company. 171 NERVES AND THE WAR degree artificial. It is not an acquisition, in the strict sense of that word, any more than the spiritual power which comes from shunning evils as sins is an acquisition of our own. As the gaining of spiritual strength comes through the full realization that we cannot progress in our regeneration through any selfish effort, that the first necessity for spiritual growth is the dropping of self and selfish desires, so in this physical work the first object is an absolute letting go of all unnecessary tension - all tension that has been impressed upon the muscles through an excess of effort in our daily lives, through a feel- ing of responsibility which is officious and presumptuous, although often it is purely unconscious ; tension that comes through hereditary habit, througli needless anxiety, and through causes innumerable, but, hard as it is to say 172 THE HEART OF GOOD HEALTH so, and harder still to acknowledge, which are all selfish in one way or another. The first thought that comes to us is, then, "Remove the cause in the mind, and that which is merely the effect muscular tension and nervous strain will disappear." So it will, eventually, but not by any means so quickly or so easily as when the effect is studied with the cause, or even, in some cases, as when the effect is first studied alone, and the mind led gradually from that to the cause. Sometimes it works one way and sometimes another, with dif- ferent individuals according to their states. But that greater help has come from working on the spiritual cause and natural effect, either simultaneously or successively, has been proved too many times to be denied. Whether the pupil is first trained in causes or in effects, the 173 NERVES AND THE WAR heart and mind of the teacher should always work primarily in causes. How many trusting, patient souls do we see with the muscles of the forehead strained so that their eyebrows never fall to a normal height? They believe themselves to be trustful, perhaps even at rest. Help them to become conscious of these strained muscles, to become sensitive to the unnecessary physical tension, and, as they learn to drop it, they should invariably be led to consider the selfish spiritual tension which is the cause, and new light may be perceived and new and deeper rest found. The Divine in us flows into external forms, and, through them, leads us to an internal light from which our lives are renewed. So the external evidences of the misapplication and misuse of our own wonderful machine, as we see them clearly and overcome them, lead us into THE HEART OF GOOD HEALTH new acknowledgments of the spiritual causes and a new sense of the absolute- ness of the Divine power. There is so much that might be said, showing the necessity for this training, there are so many examples that might be given in proof of the good it can and has already accomplished, that it would be difficult to tell where to stop ; but, above all, I desire to make evident its perfect prac- ticability. There is too much mysti- cism, there are too many lofty expres- sions of truth, but too little natural use of it. And, while from any natural basis we might rise to spiritual truths that would amaze us in their power and beauty, they would be lost to sight entirely or would topple over and come to nothing if not started from a broad and firm foundation of real love of use. Perhaps it will be best to give first as concisely as possible a general idea of NERVES AND THE WAR the physical training alone. To many who follow it the spiritual counterpart will be quite evident, as, step by step, the natural process is described. Francois Delsarte was the originator or discoverer of the training; but, al- though he seemed to have in many ways a wonderful instinct, he branched off into motions and attitudes supposed to be helpful to the development of ex- pression, but so utterly artificial, such sham work from beginning to end, and so disastrous in their results, that it is difficult to understand how the same man could express at one and the same time such absolute falsity and such helpful truth. All the good in Delsarte can also be found in the writings of Swedenborg, and so much more besides, that it is to Swedenborg one naturally turns in grat- itude. Many ancient and modern 176 THE HEART OF GOOD HEALTH philosophers have written most helpfully on this subject, but none with the same fulness as Swedenborg. Swedenborg says, "The interior things of the mind are in no power except through the forces of the body, and these forces are not in power except through the action of the body itself." And again, "In order that all things of the body may preserve their formation, and thus be permanent in their functions, man requires to be nourished and to be continually renewed." Now man is nourished and renewed physically with food, with fresh air, and with rest. If our bodies are habitually contracted, they will not get their full amount of nourishment from either of these three sources. Some scientists, in studying the pro- cess of digestion, put a bit of metal into the food which they gave a dog and 177 NERVES AND THE WAR then applied the X-ray so that they might see the progress of the metal through the stomach. It started all right, according to the well-known pro- cess of digestion, and then some one startled the dog and made him angry ; immediately the metal ball was seen to stop still. When they quieted the dog and soothed him, the metal was seen to start again in the regular process of digestion. This experiment was re- peated several times. Every time the dog's nerves or muscles became con- tracted from fright or anger, or from any form of excitement, the ball stopped. When the dog became quiet and com- fortable, the process of digestion went on normally. This experiment proved conclusively the effect of superfluous contractions upon the nourishing of the body. How can a body be whole- somely nourished when digestion is 178 THE HEART OF GOOD HEALTH constantly interrupted? And, if the in- terruption caused by a momentary strain is so decided, the interference must be constant when a man is in a state of habitual excitement, and his stomach therefore habitually contracted. The stomach and all the digestive organs have to push through with their work as best they can, but the effect of the strain is sure to appear somewhere, for to do this work with such a handicap the stomach must rob the brain of power that ought to have been used elsewhere. When the dog was soothed, the digestive process went on as if it had not been interrupted, which suggests how steadily nature's laws are working to serve us if we will only give them even the least opportunity. Nature will do nine tenths of the work for us if we will only be thorough and persistent in doing our own small share. But we ap- 179 NERVES AND THE WAR pear to have neglected the great physical laws as completely as it is possible to do without actually putting an end to our lives, and then we complain of the burden of our bodies. We resist the normal efforts of the stomach to digest and distribute nour- ishment from our food ; we resist the normal action of our lungs to take oxygen from the air and distribute it in the blood ; and as for the process of resting with most of us it is neces- sary to acquire, by voluntary effort and study, the standard of rest that should be natural to every human being. All these contractions which inter- fere with the best nourishment of our bodies through food and air, and inter- fere with our normal rest, come from selfish desires. It is as if our nerves were all little fists grabbing, like a selfish child, for what they want; and when 1 80 THE HEART OF GOOD HEALTH the mother says, "No, that would make my child ill," the selfishness in the baby tries all the more to grab what its unintelligent childish brain de- sires. All this selfish contraction, when it has become habitual, obscures our standards, so that what should be nor- mal to us appears to be abnormal. We are so far from the true sense of re- freshment and renewal that we have no idea of the possible growth from rest; and yet, as some one wisely says : "Growth is predominantly a function of rest. Work is chiefly an energy- expending and tearing-down process. Rest following work is chiefly a building- up and growing process. Work may furnish the conditions under which sub- sequent growth may occur, but in itself it is destructive. By work we do things in the world, but we do not grow by work. We grow during rest. Rest is 181 NERVES AND THE WAR not the only condition of growth, but it is one of the essential conditions. "The best work that we do is not be- gun in our offices or at our desks, but when we are wandering in the woods or sitting quietly with undirected thoughts. From somewhere at such times there flash into our minds those ideas that direct and control our lives, visions of how to do that which previously had seemed impossible, new aspirations, hopes, and desires. Work is the process of realization. The careful balance and the great ideas come largely during quiet, and without being sought. The man who never takes time to do nothing will hardly do great things. He will hardly have epoch-making or even stimu- lating ideas. "Rest is thus not merely in order to recuperate for work. If so, we should rest only when fatigued. We need to 182 THE HEART OF GOOD HEALTH do nothing at times when we are as well as possible, when our whole natures are ready for their finest product. We need occasionally to leave them undi- rected in order that we may receive these messages by wireless from the Unknown. We need to have the in- strument working at its greatest per- fection, be undirected and receptive. I am not advocating a mystic idea. "Rest is as important as work. Dreams must precede action. Con- centrated art is not art, and the acquir- ing of facts is not growth." Our misunderstanding of rest, and the habit of contraction which interferes with proper rest, digestion, and breath- ing, interfere equally with our move- ment and our work. It is a well-known fact that a loco- motive engine only utilizes nineteen per cent of the fuel that it burns, the other 183 NERVES AND THE WAR eighty -one per cent being, so far as we can see, absolutely wasted. So it is with the use of the human body in its present degenerate state, and especially with the American human body. A few days' careful observation will make this quite evident, even to one who has never thought of the question before. Watch the unnecessary movement of the heads or hands of people talking or reading aloud, the unnecessary tension used in walking and in every other movement. At first, if you have not thought of it before, you will see only one or two ex- amples; but, as you continue to ob- serve, the misused energy will become more and more evident. As, for in- stance, the fact that a man who would give to the unobservant the impression of perfect calmness, if not of perfect ease, is, while talking, constantly making 184 THE HEART OF GOOD HEALTH slight nervous motions of the hands and feet. It will naturally occur to us to think, "But I do not wish to notice all this; it will annoy me to see it in others, and make me unpleasantly self-conscious to notice it in myself." So it will; it will make one very unpleasantly self-con- scious at first, but that is necessary to the overcoming of the evil and the drop- ping into a more perfect unconscious- ness of self. And in proof of this, let me turn for a moment to the spiritual aspect of the case. In a little posthumous work on Charity, Emanuel Swedenborg says, "In so far as any one does not take cog- nizance of and know what sins are, he does not see but that he is without sins."' And again, "In so far as any one takes cognizance of and knows what sins are, he can see them in himself, 185 NERVES AND THE WAR confess them before the Lord, and re- pent of them." In another book we read, "When it is permitted man to think the evils of his life's love even to intention, they are cured by spiritual means as diseases are by natural means," and "he who does not think above it is m the darkness of night concerning the state of his life." I have heard an invalid who had been talking about herself for hours assert positively that she was not self-cen- tered. I have heard a man whose love of rule was evident in most things that he said and did, say with confidence that there was one sin from which he was exempt, and that was the desire to rule over others. We all know men and women with prominent, grievous faults of which they are entirely ignorant. As we observe this ignorance, we are filled with terror as to what monstrous 1 86 THE HEART OF GOOD HEALTH selfishness we may be indulging without knowing it, and our only protection, and that is protection enough, is a willingness to acknowledge where we are wrong the moment the wrong is brought to our notice; and this alertness should be as active with little sins as with big ones. As with sins of the spirit, so with sins of the body ; and a misuse of nervous energy must certainly be counted a sin. When we use more nervous force than is necessary for one action, are we not stealing vitality which is intended to give us new strength for many other uses ? Are we not actually taking what does not belong to us ? for only the force needed for the best performance of the action is really ours ; for all our energy is given us in trust for useful purposes. Whatever we have to do is more per- fectly accomplished by moving accord- 187 NERVES AND THE WAR ing to the laws of nature; superfluous effort only blurs and blunders. In many cases of trouble the nervous contraction resulting from self -conscious- ness is the larger part of it and not the self-consciousness itself. People suf- fer from self-consciousness in various forms. They are often prevented from living usefully by this involuntary con- traction which comes whenever they must appear before others, whereas, if they could once gain real freedom of nerves and muscles, what had seemed a deep-seated characteristic which must be borne as one of life's burdens would entirely disappear. The discovery and true understanding of self-consciousness lead us at once beyond and above them, and we find new pleasure and ease in living out to others, and for others. A noble spirit is often prevented from developing its best powers of use by the 188 THE HEART OF GOOD HEALTH clogging of the physical channels through which it must act ; and it suffers be- cause, not recognizing any physical im- pediment, the trouble seems to be en- tirely spiritual and so more serious. Of course the root of self-conscious- ness is the desire to appear well before others, but often when we have put away the excessive care for appearances, the inherited contraction belonging to it still remains with us ; then, if we give our attention to freeing ourselves from the physical tension, we not only lib- erate the body, but the spirit is thus enabled to express itself more truly in outward action ; moreover the freer the body is, the more sensitively it reflects the immediate mistakes of the spirit. In this physical training whose object is to save at least a part of the waste of human energy, and to help us to a better 189 NERVES AND THE WAR and more economical management of our human engine, progress should be steady but gradual. First, all force must be dropped, the tension must be taken from our bodies entirely, and this brings us physically as nearly to the state of a healthy baby as is possible. But it cannot be done all at once; it cannot be done with every part of the body at once. The body must be taken piecemeal sometimes in one order, sometimes in another, according to in- dividual needs. There are motions for freeing the muscles connected with the head ; and it is surprising to find how much force we use to hold our own heads on, as we may prove by our in- ability to let them drop down. Nature will hold them on for us much better than we can, and we only hinder her by trying to help. The personal endeavor hitherto has been unconscious ; but as 190 THE HEART OF GOOD HEALTH soon as we become conscious of it, how can we cease trying until we have dropped our personal officiousness to that extent ? In the head is the source of the nerv- ous system, and the quieting effect of freeing it is felt all over the body. It is not within the province of this essay to describe the exercises, even if they could be written so clearly that they might be followed and practised, which unfortunately cannot be done. When the head has regained its free- dom, partially if not entirely, then we should go to the rescue of the weakest part of the body, that is, that part of the body where the largest portion of wasted energy appears to be consumed. If that is not at once discerned, then the hands and arms should be freed, and the fingers, because of their constant use, are likely to be more tense than any 191 NERVES AND THE WAR other part of the body. The parts above the knuckles, especially, often seem as if bound by steel wires, so closely are they knit together from a too tense use of the hand. The fingers should be freed until they can hang from the wrists like little bags of sand. After that the arms are brought back to their natural state, and made to hang like larger bags of sand ; so that, when not in use, they are perfectly relaxed, as they were meant to be, and ready to turn easily, and not rigidly, to what- ever use they need to perform. Then the feet and legs are trained to be re- laxed and quiet when not in use, and the effect of this is to bring a natural rhyth- mic gait in walking. After the feet and legs come the waist muscles and the muscles of the chest. The waist muscles are especially hard to relax, and the unnecessary pressure brought 192 THE HEART OF GOOD HEALTH to bear on them in walking is, almost without exception, very striking. The most important of all the exer- cises necessary to dropping contraction and gaining a greater freedom of the body are exercises in breathing. Swedenborg says that "the breathing is according to the freedom of the life" and this assertion is quickly and easily proven to be true by a little careful ob- servation. In a tired, strained body the breathing is quick and hard ; even when sleeping, a nervously strained man will show his fatigue in his breathing and what a contrast it is to the gentle, rest- ful breathing of a healthy child. A man who is excited and full of resent- ment, or some other form of resistance, will show it at once in his breathing. Habitual resistance is reflected con- stantly in the breathing, and the habit of unnecessary tension in breathing keeps 193 NERVES AND THE WAR us in a state of chronic strain. "In machineries, any motion which is super- abundant, or not turned to use, is hurtful to the object sought, precisely because motion always has effects, which in the latter case mix with the intended result, and confuse or disarrange it. This applies more strikingly to the hu- man frame than to anything of man's making. . . . The use of breathing is to communicate motion to the body, to distribute it to the different machineries or viscera, to enable them to go to work according to their powers. . . . For the body is a chain of substances and organs whose connections are so disposed, that motions communicated from within, vi- brate from end to end, and from side to side, and extend to the extremities of the limbs before they are absorbed. . . . The plain consequence is that the nerves and the spinal marrow are expanded 194 THE HEART OF GOOD HEALTH with each inspiration. Either that or they resist the inspiration, and in this case the unity of the body is at an end. ... If they are expanded or en- larged when the lungs draw them out, of course a physical fluid enters them to fill the space created, and tends to free the organs to which they are dis- tributed. In this way the nervous sys- tem, the focus of life, opens the frame at the same intervals as the lungs, the circumference of life ; the lungs being simply the want of living fluid, and the nerves the corresponding supply. This is an organic cooperation between ef- fect and cause, whereby the highest purposes of the organization are seconded most absolutely, and yet most freely, by the lowest." Or, to simplify it, the lungs supply the brain with power through the oxygen, which flows into the lungs and is taken up there by 195 NERVES AND THE WAR the blood and carried to the brain, and there is therefore a motion in the brain with every inhalation and exhalation of the lungs. When we inhale, the blood comes from the brain to be supplied with oxygen ; as we exhale, the blood returns to the brain with its new supply of life. If the breathing is quick and sharp and full of unnecessary effort, the motion of the brain is of course strained. If the breathing is quiet and steady and gentle, with no resistance to any inspiration, the motion of the brain is quiet and restful and strengthening. If we learn to breathe quietly, it will help us to think quietly, and wherever we are thinking quietly we are breathing quietly. "By means of the lungs, which keep everything on the move, the man is ever ready for living operations. Thus the quickness of the body's service depends 196 THE HEART OP GOOD HEALTH entirely upon its response to the anima- tion of the lungs." When motion in the body, and especially in the brain, has become habitually sharp and un- quiet and strained, we must consciously and with steady attention work to bring it back to rhythm. Even when we ap- preciate the strength of quiet thinking and aim directly to gain it, we find our- selves terribly impeded by the habitual strain of quick, irregular breathing which is so fixed upon us that we must give our attention first to regulating the physical machine before we can make it a good channel for the better work of our minds. We may begin to think quietly, and yet old, unquiet habits which have impressed themselves upon our bodies will react again and will actually dis- turb our minds. Dead deposits made by old habits can make us very great trouble if we do not recognize them as 197 NERVES AND THE WAR such and go to work with a will to re- lease ourselves from the nervous tension which those habits have made. The body is of no importance, comparatively, when we know how to use it, but it is of very great importance as an impedi- ment to our best expression if we mis- use it and allow it to establish bad habits. It will or should claim our attention then until it has become what it was intended to be a healthy ani- mal, absolutely obedient to the soul that occupies it. Long, quiet, steady breaths practised at regular intervals, even only once, and for not more than half an hour, every day, will produce a very happy change in bringing us toward unconscious rest- ful breathing. We should aim to take the breath in as gently as a fog creeps in from the sea, and to feel more as if we were letting it come in than as if we 198 THE HEART OF GOOD HEALTH were drawing it in ourselves. That takes away the nervous resistance to inspiration, which is implanted in us by other resistances, mental and physical. In letting our breath out we should feel ourselves relax inside with a sense of rest, and let the breath go out of us as the air goes out of little children's bal- loons when it is allowed to escape. We should feel as we might if we were lying in the snow, and every time we let the breath out we settled back in- voluntarily and made a deeper im- pression in the snowbank on which we were lying. After every long, deep breath the lungs will expand and contract of them- selves in breaths which at first are very full and gradually decrease until they have settled to an average length and every time we allow the lungs to have their own way after a very deep 199 NERVES AND THE WAR inhalation, the final breath reached will be nearer the normal, both in length and in force. So it is if we get out of breath in climbing a mountain, if we will stop and wait and let our lungs breathe as hard as they want to even assist them by emphasizing the hard breathing at first and then letting them go as they please, we will find that when our "second breath" comes, it will be fuller, more quiet, and more vigorous because we have let the lungs find it for themselves and not repressed their motion. Conscious, quiet, rhythmic breathing while we are lying or sitting still is also very helpful toward bringing the brain and the nerves into good condition. Sometimes we can take regular long not very long breaths, sometimes short, like a baby asleep. The sense of a gentle rhythm of motion which grows 200 THE HEART OF GOOD HEALTH upon us as we give our attention to it is especially useful. Some professional physical trainer has said that our un- conscious, everyday breathing should be as slow as six breaths to a minute. This seems very slow when we try it, and, al- though it is restful and strengthening for a while, it certainly seems somewhat exaggerated as a constant habit. But there is no doubt that our habitual breathing should be much slower than it usually is, and that to establish the habit of slow and quiet breathing would help us greatly to gain a habit of quiet, wise thinking. The breathing governs the most ex- pressive power of the human body, the human voice. Nervous and muscular contractions not only interfere with the best tones of the voice, physically ; they often make it impossible to express truly what is in our hearts. We think and 201 NERVES AND THE WAR feel strongly, and sometimes the very contractions produced by that feeling make it impossible for us to express the feeling itself. A German teacher who had a remarkable knowledge and ap- preciation of the possibility of the voice said that he knew the "soul" of the voice was in the region of the diaphragm and "with you," he said, "you Ameri- cans, you squeeze the life from the word in your throats and it is born dead." Our thoughts are expressed by our words, but the feeling which prompts the thoughts is expressed in the tones of our voice. When our habitual state of feeling has kept our bodies in constant contraction, it is impossible for any im- mediate feeling to break through the tension caused by that habitual con- traction, no matter how strong and free the feeling may be. It is orderly while we are in this 202 THE HEART OF GOOD HEALTH world that the body should be under- going a process of regeneration with the soul, for the deposits of strain left in an unregenerated body make a barrier to the growth and external expression of a truly growing soul. If these deposits were a matter of one man's lifetime, the freedom gained in the character might break through them, and so obviate the necessity of thinking of the body any more than to fulfil the conditions of breathing plenty of fresh air and eating only nourishing food. These deposits of contraction, however, have come not only from a man's personal habits, but from his grandfather and his great- grandfather, and probably from many generations back, so that a man's soul has a prison of a body from the time of his early childhood. The compensation for the necessity of working to bring the body to a state of obedience to a 203 NERVES AND THE WAR growing soul is that the work for the body is so exactly in accordance with the work for the soul that nothing permanent or eternal is lost by the physical training, in spite of our leaving the body behind when we go from this world to the next. After exercises in deep breathing, tak- ing long and full breaths, and allowing the air to escape by the natural elas- ticity of the lungs, without forcing of any kind, the whole body should be freed from all unnecessary tension ; it must be prepared to relax at any time, and so gain perfect rest. Thus the first new life felt in the regenerating body will often come from the refreshment of a natural sleep. For an exquisite example of what this may be, lift a healthy, sleeping baby ; first its head, then its arms, its legs, and finally, without waking it, hold its little 204 THE HEART OF GOOD HEALTH body on your two widely spread hands. There is no more beautiful illustration in the world of what this regeneration of the body should be, a state of freedom for the body which is as necessary and as helpful on the material plane as the regeneration of the soul on the spiritual plane. The process is a long, often a very long one, and, unless the end is constantly kept in view, sometimes tedious, but well worth close, and even severe, persistence. Action and reaction are great laws throughout the universe, and every- where in nature the action and reaction are equal, bringing perfect equilibrium, perfect rhythm. In a normal man the action and reaction of the involuntary muscles are equal ; but, alas, not so with the voluntary muscles ; their action exceeds their reaction far too often. And so they must be trained first to 205 NERVES AND THE WAR rest, and then become ready for a more perfect and natural action. This is the more interesting part of the physical training. It leads to grace, of course, for it leads to purely natural movement, and all nature is graceful. It is equilibrium that we are really aiming at. The body is made so that its normal balance is most exquisite, and, when once we find the poise given us by nature, and have learnt to pre- serve the power of rhythmic motion which is our natural birthright, the per- fect coordination of the muscles causes so quick and true a response of the body to the mind, as to bring us not only to a clearer appreciation of our wonderful mechanism, but also to enable us to for- get it entirely. The first law of motion is beautifully clear in dealing with spiritual things. In the "Laws of the Divine Providence" 206 THE HEART OF GOOD HEALTH Swedenborg says, "Nothing exists, sub- sists, is acted upon or moved by itself, but by some other being or agent; whence it follows that everything exists, subsists, is acted upon and moved by the First Being, who has no origin from another, but is in Himself the living force which is life." This is perfectly expressed on the plane of matter by the law of movement in the human body that every agent is moved from some- thing prior to it. To express it simply, if not quite scientifically, the head is moved from the muscles of the neck, the hand moves from the wrist, the forearm from the upper arm, the whole arm from the shoulder, the foot from the ankle, the lower leg from the upper, and the whole leg from the hip. The whole body should be moved from an imaginary centre about at the pit of the stomach. It is as if the brain 207 NERVES AND THE WAR were in that centre, and to watch a movement begin there and transmit itself successively throughout the body is a delight. The coordination is ex- quisite and powerful in its effect. This perfectly harmonious movement was the foundation of oriental dancing, - that dancing which has now degen- erated into a hell diametrically opposite to what must in ancient times have been the heaven of motion. It is now a lost art so far as its expression is con- cerned, but it is not a lost art inasmuch as the knowledge of it can be found and used, if any one really desires to do so. It would be a wonderful, artistic revelation if this dancing could be re- vived in all its purity. The more truly the body is regen- erated, the more exquisite is the coor- dination of every movement. The law of action and reaction is, of 208 THE HEART OF GOOD HEALTH course, followed perfectly in natural mo- tion. Take walking, for instance. The muscles used in resting upon the leg are not the same as those used in swinging it forward. Consequently, while the muscles of the hip are used in the left leg, in the right they are resting, and vice versa. Every articulation should be trained to use to its fullest natural extent, and with only the force needed to move it. And the force needed de- creases to a degree that seems wonder- ful in itself, and still more wonderful as we begin to realize the way in which we have been thumping (I use the expres- sion advisedly) upon an exquisite instru- ment that will respond to a more deli- cate touch than we are able to produce. It would of course be impossible to take the body muscle by muscle and rear- range it, and, if it were possible, we would not wish to do so. All we need 209 NERVES AND THE WAR to do is to shun the contractions that we see, to make ourselves physically free and clean; then nature comes and rear- ranges us, and in the exercises, which are of course most general, the muscles work in perfect harmony because they are left in their natural order and rela- tion to each other. Thus we learn how to allow the body to be perfectly pas- sive so that it may react to the activity of the mind ; and thus the mind itself should know how to be passive in order to react to the activity of the Divine mind. It is wonderful to see how much more perfectly artistic expression can be se- cured by means of the physical freedom than by the greatest effort of contrac- tion ; for physical freedom in the art of acting, for instance serves as a pliable and sympathetic medium through which an artistic conception can reveal 210 THE HEART OF GOOD HEALTH itself, whereas, with contracted nerves and muscles, the conception has to be laboriously and painfully manufactured. The nerves should be the vehicles of expression, not its absorbers ; and when they are free to be clear transmitters, the result of powerful expression is new strength, instead of the nervous, trem- bling fatigue which too often comes after really able effort. The Divine life is in all that is true and best in every art, indeed it is the source of all art ; and, as we learn to quiet the physical and mental tension which comes from unwholesome excite- ment, it is wonderful to see how we are lifted, by the power of the art, to a more living interest in it, to a growing appreciation of how much greater the art is than we are, and how our special work is only to remove obstructions, so that the art may express itself more 211 NERVES AND THE WAR perfectly through us. This means noth- ing unless practically applied ; and, when it is made the daily text for artistic work, in whatever form, there comes a realization of what the regeneration of body and soul might mean to the cause of true beauty and power in art. An illustration of the natural goal to be reached can hardly be given more concisely than Mr. Ruskin gives it : "Is not the evidence of ease on the very front of all the greatest works in exis- tence ? Do they not plainly say to us not 'there has been a great effort here', but * there has been a great power here ' ? It is not the weariness of mortality, but the strength of Divinity that we have to recognize in all mighty things ; and that is just what we now never recognize, but think that we are to do great things by help of iron bars and perspi- ration ; alas ! we shall do nothing that 212 THE HEART OF GOOD HEALTH way, but lose some pounds of our own weight." In his book on "Rational Psy- chology", Swedenborg beautifully de- scribes the state of the regenerate body. He says : "Patience also is written in the body; something mild and patient shines forth from the countenance, from the very sound of the speech, and so far as it appertains to the mind, from the dis- course also. The face is serene, smiling, even while others burn; the blood is softer, healthier, warm but not burning, full of vital heat but not concreted into fibers ; the pulse is lighter and more constant, the bile is not dark but more yellow in color, the arteries more yielding, the fibers tender, the organs more vigorous and ready to obey the dictates of the mind, and in all parts there is manifest a pleasing grace, if not beauty. In a 213 NERVES AND THE WAR word, each particular part of the body is patient ; for as is the mind and the animus, such is the state of the most particular parts of the whole body, since the latter conforms to the image and nature of its soul. If otherwise, it is a sign that the mind is injured from some cause. " Patience, so far as it is the tranquil and serene state of the mind, free from disturbance by the affections of the animus, is itself the most perfect state ; for the mind is, in this state, left to itself, has time for its own operations, regards its reasons more interiorly, and forms its judgments more sincerely, and out of these it selects the true, the better, and more fitting, and remits them into its will, which then is not possessed with the tumult of natural desires. Thus enjoying an almost perfect liberty, it holds the animus subject to itself as if in chains, nor does it permit it to wander 214 THE HEART OF GOOD HEALTH beyond the limits of its own choice. Thus also it commands the actions of its body, and more purely and intelli- gently receives and contemplates its sen- sations. When the mind is thus left to itself, and neither corporeal or mun- dane things nor the heat thence arising disturbs its ease, then it enjoys the in- most fellowship with its pure intellectory or the soul, and suffers natural and spiritual truths to flow in; for it is only the corporeal affections and desires of the animus which obscure and pervert the intellectual ideas of the mind. Hence it is that the mind, in its state of patience or tranquillity, is cold in its circulation as compared with the heats of the animus and thence of the body, but very full of love or of the more pure and perfect life. For that there be any mind it must be warmed with a certain love, but the purer this is, the purer is 215 NERVES AND THE WAR the mind, because the better is the life. From this state the mind regards the lower loves and those purely corporeal as infantile sports or as insane, and the more so as they are believed to be wise. Thus witnessing these it does not be- come heated and angered, but it pities, condoles, pardons, tries to amend, re- joices in its success, bears its injuries as a mother those inflicted by her child, for it embraces all in its love, while it hates vices. Patience, therefore, may well exist without anger, but it is not without its zeal by which it defends, al- though with moderation, its truths. The mind is never disturbed by such a fire, still less extinguished, but is re- freshed, for this agrees with its nature. For the rational mind, the more it is liberated from impure fires, the more it burns with the pure fire which is mild and does not rage, but restores its state. 216 THE HEART OF GOOD HEALTH "Such patience, which is the moder- ator of the passions of the animus, is rarely inborn, for every one has an in- clination to certain affections of the mind, but with age and with the judg- ment it grows, and especially is it per- fected by its own exercise; but that which is genuine does not exist without the truths of religion and the principles of piety, nor without violence done to the natures of the animus and the body. Misfortune even, and sickness, which repress the fervor of the blood and the spirits, are also frequently the causes of this patience. "The character of impatience may be inferred from this description of patience, for it is of the rational mind, which de- sires ends, while the end is hindered or obstructed by intervening obstacles or by the ideas of impossibilities, which are so many resistances, lest the will should 217 NERVES AND THE WAR break forth into acts. Hence the ani- mus which desires is tortured, and the body is distressed and the mind regards single moments as long delays. Thus the more ardent is the animus, the greater is the impatience; the more tranquil the mind, the less it is. Least of all is the impatience of those who commit their fortunes to the Divine Providence." By shunning the physical contractions made by wrong inherited and personal habits, we bring the body into a state where it can more immediately respond to the active patience of the soul. And do we not express a desire for the physical regeneration when we pray, 'Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven " ? As the new life of the soul comes from a daily growing realization that we are only forms for the reception of the 218 THE HEART OF GOOD HEALTH Divine life, that all we can do is to shun evils as of ourselves, acknowledging that the power to do so is from the Lord, so the new life of the body comes from shunning all things that would interfere with its perfect mechanism, in order to place it in harmony with the Lord's natural laws ; and then it is the Lord, through these laws, who keeps us in phys- ical order. And again, as we feel that every action of the soul is from a power above or beyond it, there is a keen pleasure in seeing the law carried out externally in every motion of the body. The soul can be regenerated and the body remain disorderly; the body can be trained to fine physical life and action, and the soul remain unregenerate ; but certainly the fulness of life must come from a more perfect harmony of the body with the soul. So long as the soul needs the body at 219 NERVES AND THE WAR all, it must be of inestimable impor- tance that the body should conform to the pure laws of nature by shunning physical evils, just as it is that the soul should be born again through shunning spiritual evils. The life of both comes from looking to the Lord. Thus, by shunning obstructions to the working of natural laws, do we bring our bodies voluntarily back again to the child state into which they were born. Through realizing a new life on the physical plane, we come to a deeper ap- preciation of the breadth and power, both physical and spiritual, of the law that says, "Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." Thus may we realize the never-end- ing difference between the innocence of ignorance and the innocence of wisdom. 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