LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
 Class 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
obstat. 
 
 GULIELMUS H. KENT, O.S.C. 
 
 Censor Deputatus. 
 
 Empritnatur. 
 
 GULIELMUS PRAEPOSITUS JOHNSON, 
 Vicarius Generalis 
 
 WESTMONASTERII, 
 die 13 Mali, 1905. 
 
" Let us remember that Nature, though 
 heathenish, reaches at her best to the foot- 
 stool of the Highest. She is not all dust^ 
 but a living portion of the spheres. In 
 aspiration it is an error to despise her, for- 
 getting that through Nature only can <we 
 ascend. Cherished, trained, and purified, 
 she is then partly 'worthy the Divine mate 
 who is to make her wholly so." 
 
 THE PILGRIM'S SCRIP. 
 
 214673 
 
PREFACE 
 
 " IT is dangerous treading here," 
 
 says the author (p. 26), "yet with rever- 
 ence I venture." For whether as a defence, 
 or as a criticism of the ascetical tradition 
 of Christianity, what he says will perhaps 
 raise objections on this side or on that. 
 Else it were not worth saying. Let it first 
 be clearly noted that he is not dealing with 
 the austerities of sanctity so far as they 
 are inspired by the purely religious and 
 mystical motives of atonement and expia- 
 tion. His theme is Asceticism, which is 
 to the " psychic " man, to the passions and 
 desires, what athletics are to the " physical " 
 man, to the limbs and muscles. It is an 
 instrument or method for the perfecting of 
 our whole nature by the due subjection of 
 the lower to the service of the higher ; 
 for the harmonious subordination of the 
 " psychic " to the " pneumatic " or spiritual. 
 
Vlll 
 
 Preface 
 
 It is therefore " for building-up and not 
 for destruction." In the Saints, the ascetical 
 tendency is frequently complicated with the 
 sacrificial and self - destructive tendency. 
 This latter is a problem apart, a problem 
 for mystics rather than for moralists. But 
 if at times the mystic may transcend, yet he 
 may never transgress the clear dictates of 
 moral reason ; and so he too may meditate 
 with profit on these pages. The crippling 
 of Brother Ass is eventually as fatal to the 
 mystical as to the moral life, both of which 
 require the free use of unimpaired faculties. 
 
 Midway between an exagge- 
 rated pessimistic spiritualism on the one side, 
 and the na'ive animalism (against which it is 
 the equally na'ive reaction) on the other, 
 stands the Great Physician of soul and 
 body alike, " with healing on his wings," 
 the Giver of the meat which perisheth 
 no less than of the meat which endureth. 
 Christian asceticism has ever been in 
 
Preface 
 
 IX 
 
 principle and in aim a synthesis, a temper- 
 ing of contraries. But if, as an imperishable 
 principle of conduct, asceticism comes more 
 directly under the jurisdiction of divine tradi- 
 tion, yet its application changes with ever 
 changing conditions of life and society, and 
 still more with our growing understanding of 
 the functions of soul and body, and of the 
 precise degree and nature of their inter- 
 dependence. To adhere rigidly and blindly 
 not merely to the ascetical principles of the 
 Past, but to their old-world applications, 
 were to ignore the bewildering changes that 
 have since swept over the face of society, 
 and to deny all value to the light which 
 has been given us from the Giver of all 
 light through the progress of Physiology 
 and Psychology. An asceticism whose zeal 
 is untempered by such knowledge may 
 easily defeat itself by inducing those very 
 same nervous and mental disorders which 
 proverbially dog the heels of indulgence, 
 and whose root in both cases is to be found 
 
x Preface 
 
 in the violation of the due balance of sense 
 and spirit. On the other hand, the laws of 
 perfect hygiene, the culture of the corpus 
 sanum, not for its own sake, but as the 
 pliant, durable instrument of the soul, are 
 found more and more to demand such a 
 degree of persevering self-restraint and self- 
 resistance as constitutes an ascesis, a morti- 
 fication, no less severe than that enjoined 
 by the most rigorous masters of the spiritual 
 life. 
 
 In these pages the thoughts 
 
 of many hearts are revealed in speech that 
 is within the faculty of few, but within the 
 understanding of all. They are an expres- 
 sion of fallible opinion, not of infallible 
 dogma. Mistakes there may be, but, as 
 the author says, " The mistake of personal 
 speculation is after all merely a mistake, 
 and no one will impute it to authority." 
 
 G. TYRRELL, SJ. 
 
 RICHMOND, YORKS. 
 April 1905. 
 
HEALTH AND 
 HOLINESS 
 
 THIS is an age when every- 
 where the rights of the weaker against 
 the stronger are being examined and 
 asserted ; the rights of labour against 
 capital, of subjects against their rulers, 
 of wives against their husbands, the 
 lower creation against its irresponsible 
 master, man. Is it coincidence merely, 
 that the protest of the body against the 
 tyranny of the spirit is also audible 
 and even hearkened ? Within the 
 Church itself, which has ever fostered 
 the claims of the oppressed against 
 the oppressor, a mild and rational 
 appeal has made itself heard. For 
 the body is the spouse of the spirit, 
 
 The 
 
 Body's V 
 rights. J 
 
 Y' 
 
12 
 
 Health and Holiness 
 
 The 
 
 Body's 
 
 appeal. 
 
 and the democratic element in the 
 complex state of man. In the very 
 courts of the spirit the claims- 
 might we say the rights? of the 
 body are being tolerantly judged. 
 
 It was not so once. The 
 
 body had no rights against her hus- 
 band, the spirit. One might say, she 
 had no marital rights : she was a 
 squaw, a hewer of wood and drawer 
 of water for her heaven-born mate. 
 Did she rebel, she was to be starved 
 into submission. Was she slack in 
 obedience, she was to be punished 
 by the infliction of further tasks. 
 Did she groan that things were 
 beyond her strength, she was goaded 
 into doing them, while the tyrannous 
 spirit bitterly exclaimed on her 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 slovenly performance. To over- 
 drive a donkey was barbarous : to 
 over-drive one's own lawful body a 
 meritorious act. A poet I know 
 has put, after his own fashion, the 
 case between body and spirit 
 
 " Said sprite o' me to body o' me : 
 
 ' A malison on thee, trustless creature, 
 
 That prat'st thyself mine effigy 
 
 To them which view thy much misfeature. 
 
 My hest thou no ways slav'st aright, 
 Though slave-service be all thy nature : 
 
 An evil thrall I have of thee, 
 
 Thou adder coiled about delight ! * 
 
 "Said body o' me to sprite o' me : 
 
 * Since bricks were wroughten without straw, 
 Was never task-master like thee ! 
 
 Who art more evil of thy law 
 Than Egypt's sooty Mizraim 
 
 That beetle of an ancient dung : 
 Nought recks it thee though I in limb 
 
 Wax meagre so thy songs be sung.' 
 
 " Thus each by other is mis-said, 
 
 And answereth with like despite ; 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 The spirit bruises body's head ; 
 
 The body fangs the heel of sprite ; 
 And either hath the other's wrong. 
 And ye may see, that of this stour 
 My heavy life doth fall her flower." 
 
 But the hallowed plea for 
 
 slave-driving the body was not poetry, 
 of which this writer's fleshly spouse 
 so piteously complains ; it was virtue. 
 And the crowning feature of the 
 happy and approved relation between 
 body and spirit was this : that the 
 luckless body could not escape by 
 obedience and eschewing rebellion : 
 she was then visited with stripes and 
 hunger lest she should rebel. The 
 body, in fact, was a proclaimed 
 enemy ; and as an enemy it was 
 treated. If it began to feel but a 
 little comfortable, high time had 
 come to set about making it un- 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 comfortable, or like Oliver it 
 would be asking for more. 
 
 Modern science and ad- 
 vanced physiology must needs be felt 
 even in the science of spirituality. 
 Men begin to suspect that much has 
 been blamed to the body which 
 should justly be laid on the mis- 
 management of its master. It is 
 felt that the body has rights : nay, 
 that the neglect of those rights may 
 cause it to take guiltless vengeance 
 on the soul. We may sin against 
 the body in other ways than are 
 catalogued in Liguori ; and impov- 
 erished blood who knows ? may 
 mean impoverished morals. The 
 ancients long ago held that love 
 was a derangement of the hepatic 
 
i6 
 
 Health and Holiness 
 
 functions. " Torrit jecur, urit jecur" 
 says Horace with damnable itera- 
 tion ; and Horace ought to know. 
 And now, not many years ago, a dis- 
 tinguished Jesuit director of souls, 
 in his letters to his penitents, has 
 hinted over and over again that 
 spiritual disease may harbour in a 
 like vicinage. 
 
 Within the limits of his 
 
 own meaning this spiritual director 
 (the late Archbishop Porter, S.J.), 
 was wisely right. He was aware 
 that men of sedentary habit and un- 
 shakably introspective temperament 
 may endure spiritual torments for 
 which a fortnight's walking-tour is 
 more sovereign than the exercises of 
 St. Ignatius. And how many such 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 men are there now ? Perhaps for 
 this very reason the delicate connec- 
 tion between mind and body is re- 
 cognised as it never was before. In 
 truth, Health, as the Archbishop 
 suggested, may be no mean part 
 of Holiness ; and not by mere super- 
 ficial analogy has imagery drawn 
 from the athlete been perpetu- 
 ally applied to the Saint. That 
 I do not speak without warrant of 
 the Archbishop's attitude, let these 
 passages from his published "Letters" 
 show : 
 
 "As for the evil thoughts, 
 
 I have so uniformly remarked in 
 your case that they are dependent 
 upon your state of health, that I 
 say without hesitation, begin a course 
 
i8 
 
 Health and Holiness 
 
 Better 
 
 feast-ful 
 
 than 
 
 of Vichy and Carlsbad." . . . "Better 
 far to eat meat on Good Friday than 
 
 fretful. . 
 
 to live in war with every one about 
 us. I fear much you do not take 
 enough food and rest. You stand 
 in need of both, and it is not wise 
 to starve yourself into misery. 
 Jealousy and all similar passions 
 become intensified when the body 
 is weak." . . . "Your account of 
 your spiritual condition is not very 
 brilliant ; still you must not lose 
 courage. . . . Much of your present 
 suffering comes, I fear, from past 
 recklessness in the matter of health." 
 
 We might quote inde- 
 finitely ; but it is enough to remind 
 the reader how much and how wisely 
 has the modern Confessor adapted 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 himself to the modern Man. Nay, 
 the very conditions of modern 
 sanctity may be said to have changed, 
 so changed are we. There was a 
 time strange as it must seem, there 
 was a time upon the earth when man 
 flew in the face of the east wind. 
 He did not like the east wind his 
 proverbs remain to tell us so; but 
 this was merely because it gave him 
 catarrh, or rheumatism, or inflamed 
 throat, and such gross outward 
 maladies. It did not dip his soul 
 in the gloom of earthquake and 
 eclipse ; his hair, and skin, and heart 
 were not made desiccate together. 
 A spiritual code which grew into 
 being for this Man whose moral 
 nature remained unruffled by the 
 east wind, may surely be said to have 
 
20 
 
 Health and Holiness 
 
 Another leaked its validity before it reached 
 
 Creation. 
 
 us. He was a being of another 
 creation. He ate, and feared not ; 
 he drank, and in all Shakespeare 
 there is no allusion to delirium tre- 
 mens ; his schoolmaster flogged him 
 large-heartedly, and he was almost 
 more tickled by the joke than by 
 the cane ; he wore a rapier at his 
 side, and stabbed or was stabbed by 
 his brother-man in pure good fellow- 
 ship and sociable high spirits. For 
 him the whole apparatus of virtue 
 was constructed, a robust system 
 fitted to a robust time. Strong, 
 forthright minds were suited by 
 strong forthright direction, redound- 
 ing vitality by severities of repres- 
 sion ; the hot wine of life needed 
 allay. But to our generation un- 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 21 
 
 compromising fasts and severities of 
 conduct are found to be piteously 
 alien ; not because, as rash censors 
 say, we are too luxurious, but be- 
 cause we are too nervous, intricate, 
 devitalised. We find our austerities 
 ready-made. The east wind has re- 
 placed the discipline, dyspepsia the 
 hair-shirt. Either may inflict a 
 more sensitive agony than a lusty 
 anchorite suffered from lashing him- 
 self to blood. It grows a vain thing 
 for us to mortify the appetite, 
 would we had the appetite to 
 mortify ! macerate an evanescing 
 flesh, bring down a body all too 
 untimely spent and forwearied, a 
 body which our liberal-lived sires 
 have transmitted to us quite effectu- 
 ally brought down. The pride of 
 
22 
 
 Health and Holiness 
 
 Man 
 his own 
 mortifi- 
 cation. 
 
 life is no more ; to live is itself an 
 ascetic exercise ; we require spurs 
 to being, not a snaffle to rein back 
 the ardour of being. Man is his 
 own mortification. Hamlet has in- 
 creased and multiplied, and his seed 
 fill the land. Would any Elsinore 
 director have advised austerities for 
 the Prince, or judged to the letter 
 his self-accusings ? and to this com- 
 plexion has many an one come. 
 The very laughers ask their night- 
 lamps 
 
 " Is all laughed in vain ? " 
 
 Merely to front existence, for some, 
 is a surrender of self, a choice of 
 ineludibly rigorous abnegation. 
 
 It was not so with our 
 
 fortunate (or, at least, earth-happier) 
 ancestors. For them, doubtless, the 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 old idea worked roughly well. They 
 lashed themselves with chains ; they 
 went about in the most frightful 
 forms of hair-shirt, which grew 
 stiffened with their blood ; and yet 
 were unrestingly energetic. For us 
 it would mean valetudinarian impo- 
 tence ; which, without heroic macera- 
 tions, is but too apt to overtake us. 
 They turned anchorites in the English 
 country, the English fens, among 
 the English fogs and raw blasts ; 
 they exposed themselves defenceless 
 to all the horrors of an English 
 summer ; and they were not con- 
 verted into embodied cramp and 
 arthritis. This implies a constitu- 
 tion we can but dimly conjecture, 
 to which austerity, so to speak, was 
 a wholesome antidote. Their bodies 
 
2 4 
 
 Health and Holiness 
 
 Giants' were hot colts, which really needed 
 training and breaking and very 
 strong breaking, too. They had 
 often, questionless, to be ridden with 
 a cruel curb. When we look at 
 Italy of the Renascence, at England 
 of the sixteenth century, we are 
 amazed. There were giants in 
 those days. Those were the days of 
 virtu when the ideal of men was 
 vital force, to do everything with 
 their whole strength. And they did 
 it. In good and in evil they re- 
 dounded. Peccafortiter^ said Luther ; 
 and they sinned strongly. Ezzelin 
 fascinating men with the horror of 
 his tyranny. Aretin blazoning his 
 lusts and infamies, Sforza ravening 
 his way to a throne, Caesar Borgia 
 conquering Italy with a poisoned 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 sword, would have sneered at the 
 scented sins of the present day. The 
 seething energies of our sixteenth 
 century, fighting, hating, stabbing, 
 plotting, throwing out poetry in 
 splendid reckless floods and cataracts, 
 seem to emanate from beings of 
 another order than ourselves. And 
 these men who are thrown to the 
 forefront of history imply a fierce 
 undercurrent of general vitality. 
 The mediaeval men fight amidst the 
 torrid lands of the East jerkined and 
 breeched with iron which it makes 
 us ache to look upon ; our men in 
 khaki fall out by hundreds during 
 peace - manoeuvres on an English 
 down. They cheapened pain, those 
 forefathers of ours ; they endured 
 and apportioned the most monstrous 
 
26 
 
 Health and Holiness 
 
 jocose tortures with equal carelessness, reek- 
 torture. _ . . 
 
 less of their own suffering or that of 
 
 others. Read the tortures inflicted 
 on the rebels against Henry IV. ; 
 and how " good old Sir Thomas 
 Erpingham " rode round one of 
 them, taunting him in the awful 
 crisis of his agony. Yet Sir Thomas 
 died at Agincourt in the odour of 
 knightly honour, and doubtless was as 
 far from remembering that thought- 
 less little incivility as any one was 
 from remembering it against him. 
 We cannot conceive the exuberant 
 vitality and nervous insensibility of 
 these men. Some image of the 
 latter quality we may get by turning 
 to the ascetics of the East, who still 
 swing themselves by the heels over a 
 smoky fire, and practise other public 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 27 
 
 forms of self-torture, with (ap- 
 parently) small nervous exhaustion. 
 Here and there among ourselves, of 
 course, such conditions still exist to 
 witness what was once usual. Such 
 bodies, we may well believe, needed 
 the awe of hunger and stripes, and, 
 without rigorous rebuke from the 
 spirit, were always lying in wait for 
 its heel. 
 
 But not only have con- 
 ditions changed : there is another 
 influence, unrecognised, yet subtly 
 potent in affecting an altered attitude 
 towards the externals of asceticism. 
 The interaction between body and 
 spirit is understood, or at least appre- 
 hended (for comprehended it cannot 
 be), as never it was before. St. Paul, 
 
28 
 
 Paul the 
 
 Health and Holiness 
 
 indeed, that profoundly original and 
 
 Intuitive. ... i i 
 
 intuitive mind, long since saw and 
 first proclaimed it, in its broad theo- 
 logical aspect. " I do not that good 
 which I will ; but the evil which I 
 hate, that I do ... The good which 
 I will, I do not ; but the evil which I 
 will not, that I do. ... I find then a 
 law, that when I will to do good, 
 evil is present with me. For I am 
 delighted with the law of God, 
 according to the inward man : but 
 I see another law in my members, 
 fighting against the law of my mind, 
 and captivating me in the law of sin, 
 that is in my members. Unhappy 
 man that I am, who shall deliver me 
 from the body of this death ? " 
 That was the primal cry of the 
 discovery, which has never been 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 29 
 
 more pregnantly and poignantly ex- 
 pressed. Upon it arose a complex 
 theological system ; but outside that 
 system, the realisation of this mys- 
 terious truth went no further. One 
 might almost say that its intimacy 
 was removed and deadened by the 
 circumvallation of theological truisms. 
 But the progress of physiological 
 research has brought it home to the 
 flesh of man. Science, not for the 
 sole time or the last, has become the 
 witness and handmaid of theology. 
 Scripture swore that the sins of the 
 fathers should be visited on the 
 children to the third and fourth 
 generation ; science has borne testi- 
 mony to that asseveration with the 
 terrible teaching of heredity. Of 
 the internecine grapple between 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 The im- 
 memorial 
 grapple. 
 
 body and spirit, Science, quick to 
 question the spirit, has in her own 
 despite witnessed much. With the 
 fable of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. 
 Hyde " Stevenson has simply in- 
 carnated St. Paul's thesis in un- 
 forgettable romance. But upon 
 this quickened and vital sense of 
 the immemorial grapple between 
 body and soul has come also a 
 sense of its unsuspected complexity. 
 We can no longer set body against 
 spirit and let them come to grips 
 after the light-hearted fashion of 
 our ancestors. We realise that 
 their intertwinings are of infinite 
 delicacy, endless multiplicity : no 
 stroke upon the one but is innumer- 
 ably reverberated by the other. We 
 cannot merely ignore the body : it 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 will not be ignored, and has un- 
 guardable avenues of retaliation. 
 This is no rough-and-tumble fight, 
 with no quarter for the vanquished. 
 We behold ourselves swayed by 
 ghostly passions ; the past usurps 
 us ; the dead replay their tragedy 
 on our fleshly stage. To the body 
 itself we owe a certain inevitable 
 obedience, as the father owes a 
 measure of obeisance to the child, 
 and the ruler is governed by the 
 ruled. The imperial spirit must 
 order his going by his fleshly shackles ; 
 he must hear it said, " Thou shalt 
 stretch forth thy hands, and another 
 shall bind thee, and lead thee whither 
 thou wouldst not." And wisdom 
 will often submit to the tyrannous 
 impotence of the inferior. For 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 Tyranny 
 f im- 
 potence. 
 
 o 
 
 though weak compliance be fatal, 
 arrogant rigidity is like to be only 
 less so. The stumbling of the feeble 
 subject shall bring down the strong 
 ruler ; a brain-fever change a straight- 
 walking youth into a flagitious and 
 unprincipled wastrel. But recently 
 we had the medically-reported case 
 of a model lad who after an illness 
 proved a liar and a pilferer. It were 
 unsafe, truly, to reason from extremes; 
 but extremes bring into light forces 
 and tendencies which in their wonted 
 action go unsuspected. 
 
 Even in the heroic ages, 
 
 of men and religion, did these things 
 play no part unrecognised ? Was 
 the devil always the devil ? Whether 
 the devil might on occasion be the 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 33 
 
 stomach (as the Archbishop hints) 
 may be a perilous question ; though 
 some will make small scruple that 
 the stomach may be the devil. That 
 the demon could have been purged 
 from Saul by medicinal draughts 
 were a supposition too much in the 
 manner of the Higher Criticism ; 
 though to Macbeth's interrogation : 
 " Canst thou not minister to a mind 
 diseased ? " the modern M.D. of 
 Edinburgh would answer . " Sire, 
 certainly ! " He can often purge 
 from the mind a rooted trouble ; nor 
 do we in such cases throw physic to 
 the dogs. But as men lay their sins 
 on the devil who indeed save him 
 the labour of tempting them, so he 
 may be accused for that which comes 
 only from the mishandling of their 
 
34 
 
 Health and Holiness 
 
 Sanctity 
 is Genius 
 in Reli- 
 
 own bodies. The author of mis- 
 chief can leave much mischief to be 
 worked for him, and needs but to 
 wait on men's mistakes. Even in 
 the ascetic way, shall one aver such 
 error could not have intruded? It 
 is dangerous treading here ; yet with 
 reverence I adventure : since the mis- 
 take of personal speculation is after 
 all merely a mistake, and no one will 
 impute to it authority. 
 
 Grace does not cast out 
 
 nature ; but the way of grace is 
 founded on nature. Sanctity is 
 genius in religion ; the Saint lives 
 for and in religion, as the man of 
 genius lives for and in his peculiar 
 attainment. Nay, it might be said 
 that sanctity is the supreme form of 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 35 
 
 genius, and the Saints the only true 
 men of genius ; with the great differ- 
 ence that sanctity is dependent on no 
 special privilege or curse of tem- 
 perament. Both are the outcome of 
 a man's inner and individual love, 
 and are characterised by an eminent 
 fervour, which is the note of love 
 in action. Bearing these things in 
 mind, it should not surprise us to 
 find occasional parallelisms between 
 the psychology of the Saints and the 
 psychology of men of genius, paral- 
 lelisms which study might perhaps 
 extend, and which are specially 
 observable where the genius is of the 
 poetic or artistic kind in the broad 
 sense of the word " artistic." Both 
 Saint and Poet undergo a prepara- 
 tion for their work ; and in both a 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 "Poet 
 
 and 
 
 Saint." 
 
 notable feature of this preparation is 
 a period of preliminary retirement. 
 Even the Poets most in and of the 
 world experience it in some form ; 
 though in their case it may be an 
 inward process only, leaving no trace 
 on their outward life. It is part of 
 the mysterious law which directs all 
 fruitful increase. The lily, about to 
 seed, withdraws from the general 
 gaze, and lapses into the claustral 
 bosom of the water. Spiritual in- 
 cubation obeys the same unheard 
 command ; whether it be Coleridge 
 in his cottage at Nether Stowey, or 
 Ignatius in his cave at Manresa. In 
 Poet, as in Saint, this retirement is a 
 process of pain and struggle. For 
 it is nothing else than a gradual 
 conformation to artistic law. He 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 37 
 
 absorbs the law into himself; or 
 rather he is himself absorbed into 
 the law, moulded to it, until he 
 become sensitively respondent to its 
 faintest motion, as the spiritualised 
 body to the soul. Thenceforth he 
 needs no guidance from formal rule, 
 having a more delicate rule within 
 him. He is a law to himself, or 
 indeed he is the law. In like man- 
 ner does the Saint receive into him- 
 self and become one with divine 
 law, whereafter he no longer needs 
 to follow where the flocks have 
 trodden, to keep the beaten track of 
 rule ; his will has undergone the 
 heavenly magnetisation by which it 
 points always and unalterably towards 
 God. 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 Emo- 
 tional 
 vibration. 
 
 In both Saint and Poet 
 
 this process is followed by a rapid 
 and bountiful development of power : 
 in both there are throes, as it were 
 the throes of birth. Light and dark- 
 ness succeed each other like the 
 successive waves of sun and gloom 
 on a hillside under a brightly windy 
 sky ; but the gloom is prolonged, 
 the light swift and intermittent. 
 The despairing chasms of agony 
 into which the Saints are plunged 
 have their analogy in those par- 
 oxysms of loss and grief related by 
 Chateaubriand, Berlioz, and others. 
 How far these things are conditioned 
 by the body in the case of the Poet 
 is obscure. If the uniform nature, 
 in them all, of these emotional crises 
 points to a psychic origin, it is none 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 39 
 
 the less difficult to avoid the suspi- 
 cion, the probable suspicion, that 
 physical reaction is an accessory 
 cause. In the case of the Saint, 
 shall we hold the body always guilt- 
 less? Did those passionate austeri- 
 ties of the Manresa cavern (for one 
 typical instance) leave the body hale 
 and sane ? Had we to reckon solely 
 with the natural order, the answer 
 would not be doubtful ; and, since 
 sanctity has never asserted itself an 
 antidote against the consequences of 
 indiscreet actions, I know not why 
 one should shrink from drawing the 
 likely conclusion and adventuring 
 tl e likely hypothesis. That celestial 
 unwisdom of fast, vigil, and corporal 
 chastening must, it is like, have ex- 
 posed Ignatius to the reactions of 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 The 
 
 body's 
 revenges. 
 
 the weakened body. Fast is the 
 diet of angels, said St. Athanasius ; 
 and Milton echoed him 
 
 " Spare fast, that oft with gods doth diet." 
 
 But when mortals surfeit on that 
 food, and superadd stripes and night- 
 watching, the forspent body is prone 
 to strange revenges. In some mea- 
 sure, is it not possible such may 
 have mingled with the experiences 
 and temptations of Ignatius ? The 
 reality of these ghostly conflicts 
 there is not need to doubt ; I do 
 not doubt. But with them who 
 shall say what may have been the 
 intermixture of subjective symp- 
 toms, fumes of the devitalised flesh ? 
 When, the agony past, the battle 
 won, the wedlock with divine law 
 achieved, Ignatius emerged from the 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 cave to carry his hard-won spiritual 
 arms against the world, he saw 
 coiled round a wayside cross a green 
 serpent. Was this indeed an ap- 
 parition, to be esteemed beside the 
 heavenly monitions of the cavern, 
 or rather such stuff as Macbeth's 
 air-drawn dagger, the issue of an 
 over -wrought brain ? I recall a 
 poet, passing through that process 
 of seclusion and interior gestation 
 already considered. In his case the 
 psychological manifestations were 
 undoubtedly associated with disorder 
 of the body. In solitude he under- 
 went profound sadness and suffered 
 brief exultations of power : the wild 
 miseries of a Berlioz gave place to 
 accesses of half-pained delight. On 
 a day when the skirts of a prolonged 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 A 
 
 modern 
 instance. 
 
 darkness were drawing off for him, 
 he walked the garden, inhaling the 
 keenly languorous relief of mental 
 and bodily convalescence ; the nerves 
 sensitised by suffering. Pausing in 
 reverie before an arum, he suddenly 
 was aware of a minute white-stoled 
 child sitting on the lily. For a 
 second he viewed her with surprised 
 delight, but no wonder; then re- 
 turning to consciousness, he recog- 
 nised the hallucination almost in the 
 instant of her vanishing. The ap- 
 parition had no connection with his 
 reverie ; and though not perhaps so 
 strongly visual as to deceive an alert 
 mind, suggests the possibility of such 
 deception. Furthermore, one notes 
 that the green serpent of St. Ignatius, 
 unlike the divine monitions in the 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 43 
 
 cave, unlike the visions in general of 
 the saints, was apparently purpose- 
 less : it had not function of warning, 
 counsel, temptation, or trial. Yet 
 repetitions of the experience in the 
 saint's after life make it rash, de- 
 spite all this, to decide what is not 
 capable of decision, and to say that 
 it may have been a trick of fine- 
 worn nerves. 
 
 There is at any rate a 
 
 possibility that, even in the higher 
 ascetic life, the means used to re- 
 move the stumbling-block of the 
 body may set up in it a fresh 
 stumbling-block, to a certain degree ; 
 that even here Brother Ass may take 
 his stubborn retaliation ; and this is a 
 possibility of which our ancestors had 
 
44 
 
 Health and Holiness 
 
 Asceti- 
 cism with 
 a differ- 
 ence. 
 
 no dream. St. Ignatius himself came 
 to think that he had done penance 
 not wisely but too well at Manresa ; 
 nevertheless it was only the after- 
 effects at which he glanced, the im- 
 pairing of his physical utility in later 
 years. With modern lack of consti- 
 tution the possibility is increased. No 
 spread of knowledge can efface asceti- 
 cism ; but we may, perhaps, wear our 
 asceticism with a difference. 
 
 The devil is out of most 
 
 of our bodies before our youth is 
 long past ; in many it scarce exists. 
 The modern body hinders perfec- 
 tion after the way of the weakling ; 
 it scandalises by its feebleness and 
 sloth ; it exceeds by luxury and the 
 softer forms of vice, not by hot 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 45 
 
 insurgence; it abounds in vanity, 
 frivolity, and all the petty sins of 
 the weakling which vitiate the spirit ; 
 it pushes to pessimism, which is the 
 wail of the weakling turning back 
 from the press ; to agnosticism, 
 which is sometimes a form of men- 
 tal sloth " It is too much trouble 
 to have a creed." It no longer lays 
 forcible hands on the spirit, but clogs 
 and hangs back from it. And in 
 some sort there was more hope with 
 the old body than with this new one. 
 When the energies of the old body 
 were once yoked to the chariot-pole 
 of God, they went fast. But what 
 shall be made of a body whose ener- 
 gies lie down in the road ? When to 
 these things is added the crowning 
 vice and familiar accompaniment of 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 Saints' weakness selfishness, it is clear in- 
 
 regrets. 
 
 deed that we require an asceticism ; 
 but not so clear that the asceticism 
 we require is the old asceticism. 
 Can this inertia of the modern body 
 be met by breaking still further the 
 beast already over -feeble for its 
 load ? It is not possible. In those 
 old valiant days, when the physical 
 frame waxed fat and kicked, the 
 most ardent saints ended in the 
 confession of a certain remorse for 
 their tyrannous usage of the accursed 
 flesh. St. Ignatius, we have said, 
 came to think he had needlessly 
 crippled his body after all, a neces- 
 sary servant by the unweighed 
 severity of Manresa. Even the 
 merciless Assisian merciless to- 
 wards himself, as tender towards all 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 47 
 
 others confessed on the deathbed 
 of his slave-driven body: "I have 
 been too hard on Brother Ass." 
 
 Yes, Brother Ass, poor 
 
 Brother Ass, had been inhumanly 
 ridden ; and but for his stubborn 
 constitution would have gone nigh 
 to hamper the sanctity he could 
 not prevent. In these days he is 
 a weak beast, and may not stand a 
 tithe of the burdens a Francis of 
 Assisi piled upon him with scarce 
 more than a responsive groan. 
 Chastening he needs : he will not 
 sustain overmuch chastisement. Yet 
 we retain much of the red-tape 
 asceticism which pertained to those 
 robuster days. Our monastic rules 
 were designed for another age. 
 
4 8 
 
 Health and Holiness 
 
 Ascetic They have been mitigated, in some 
 
 red-tape. r , 
 
 of the severer Orders, to meet 
 modern exigencies : but no mitigation 
 can effectually alter their unsuita- 
 bility to this modern Britain. They 
 are not only obsolete : the whole 
 incidence of them was devised for a 
 sunny clime, a clime of olives, wine, 
 and macaroni. Fasts fall plump and 
 frequent in the winter season, when 
 in the North they mean unmeditated 
 stress upon the young constitution ; 
 while the summer, when fast could 
 be borne, goes almost free of fast. 
 So you have Orders where scarce the 
 rosiest novice passes his profession 
 without an impaired, if not a shat- 
 tered, constitution. Not so much the 
 amount, but the incidence, of aus- 
 terity needs revision. Not solely in 
 
UNIVERSITY 
 
 V 
 \^ 
 
 Health and Holiness 
 
 49 
 
 the kingdoms of this world, but in 
 the kingdom also of God, the admin- 
 istration may become infected by the 
 red-tape microbe. 
 
 But this is to invade the 
 
 domain of monastic asceticism, which 
 is beyond my province. Quite 
 enough is the weltering problem of 
 secular religion. How shall asceti- 
 cism address itself to this etiolated 
 body of death ? For all that I have 
 said regards only the externals of 
 asceticism. Asceticism in its essence 
 is always and inevitably the same. 
 The weak, dastardly, and selfish 
 body of to-day needs an asceticism 
 never more. The task before religion 
 is to persuade and constrain the body 
 to take up its load. It demands 
 
5 
 
 Health and Holiness 
 
 The 
 body of 
 life. 
 
 great tenderness and great firmness, 
 as with a child. The child is led by 
 love, and swayed by authority. It 
 must feel the love behind the inflex- 
 ible will ; the will always firm behind 
 the love. And to-day, as never be- 
 fore, one must love the body, must 
 be gently patient with it : 
 
 " Daintied o'er with dear devices, 
 Which He loveth, for He grew." 
 
 The whole scheme of his- 
 tory displays the body as " Creation's 
 and Creator's crowning good." The 
 aim of all sanctity is the redemption 
 of the body. The consummation of 
 celestial felicity is reunion with the 
 body. All is for the body; and 
 holiness, asceticism itself, rest (next 
 to love of God) on love of the body. 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 As love, in modern Christianity, is 
 increasingly come to be substituted 
 for the motive-power of fear ; may 
 it not be that love of the body should 
 increasingly replace hatred of the 
 body as the motive even of asceti- 
 cism ? We need (as it were) to show 
 a dismayed and trembling body, 
 shrinking from the enormity of the 
 world, that all, even rigour and 
 suppression, is done in care for it. 
 The incumbency of daily duty, the 
 constant frets of the world and social 
 intercourse, the intermittent friction 
 of that ruined health which is to 
 most of us the legacy from our hard- 
 living ancestors, the steady mortifica- 
 tion of our constitutional sloths and 
 vanities ; may not these things make 
 in themselves a handsome asceticism, 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 The day's less heroic, but not less effectual than 
 
 burden. . . 
 
 the showy austerities or our fore- 
 fathers? A wise director, indeed, 
 said, " No." Such external and 
 unsought mortifications came to 
 be borne as an habitual matter- 
 grudged but accepted, like the gout 
 or some pretty persistent ailment. 
 The observation may be shrewdly 
 right ; but I confess I doubt it. 
 The accumulated burthen of these 
 things seems to me to exact a weary 
 and daily nay, hourly fresh inten- 
 tion. If, however, voluntary inflic- 
 tions be necessary to subdue this 
 all-too-subdued body, they should 
 not be far to seek without heroic 
 macerations which very surely our 
 stumbling Brother Ass cannot 
 support. 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 53 
 
 The co-operation of the 
 
 body must be enlisted in the struggle 
 against the body. It is the lusts of 
 the healthy body which are formid- 
 able ; but to war with them the 
 body (paradoxically) must be kept in 
 health; the soldier must be fed, 
 though not pampered. Without 
 health, no energy; without energies, 
 no struggle. Seldom does the 
 faineant become the Saint ; the 
 vigorous sinner often. Pecca fortiter 
 (despite Luther) is no maxim of 
 spirituality ; but he that sins strongly 
 has the stuff of sanctity, rather than 
 the languid sinner. The energies 
 need turning Godward ; but the 
 energies are most necessary. Prayer 
 is the very sword of the Saints ; but 
 prayer grows tarnished save the brain 
 
54 
 
 Health and Holiness 
 
 Health 
 
 and 
 
 Prayer. 
 
 be healthful, nor can the brain be 
 long healthful in an unhealthy body. 
 So you have that sage Archbishop 
 already quoted advising against long 
 morning devotions for weaker 
 vessels : " The brain requires some 
 time after the night's rest, and some 
 food, to regain its normal power," 
 says he. And again : " You are 
 suffering the consequences of the 
 wilfulness as regards health in years 
 long past ; these consequences cannot 
 be prevented now. The most you 
 can do, the most you can hope for, 
 is to lessen them as much as pos- 
 sible." Or yet again : " The most 
 you can do is to be patient, to avoid 
 swearing and grumbling, to say some 
 prayers mechanically, or to look at 
 your crucifix." These things are 
 
 I 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 55 
 
 not said to Saints : but alas ! sanctity 
 has small beginnings ; there are no 
 short cuts, no " Royal roads " (as 
 a-Kempis says) to God. One must 
 start even like these unheroic souls ; 
 and on those most weary small 
 beginnings all the after-issues rest. 
 Not so much to restrain, but to foster 
 the energies of our dilettanti and for- 
 weary bodies, and throw them on the 
 ghostly Enemy ; that is the task 
 before us. For that, is this Fabian 
 strategy all which remains to us ? 
 
 To foster the energies of 
 
 the body, yes ; and to foster also the 
 energies of the will : that is the cry- 
 ing need of our uncourageous day. 
 There is no more deadly prevalent 
 heresy than the mechanical theory 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 The 
 
 lynch-pin 
 of the 
 faculties. 
 
 which says : " You are what you are, 
 and you cannot be otherwise." Linked 
 with it is the false and sloven charity 
 which pleads : " We are all precious 
 scoundrels in some fashion ; so let us 
 love one another ! " The fraternity 
 of criminals, the brotherly love of 
 convicts. That only can come out 
 of a man which was in a man ; but 
 the excessive can be pruned, the 
 latent be educed ; and this is the 
 function of the will. The will is the 
 lynch-pin of the faculties. Nor, 
 more than the others, is it a station- 
 ary power, as modern materialism 
 assumes it to be. The weak will 
 can be strengthened, the strong will 
 made stronger. The will grows by 
 its own exercise, as the thews and 
 sinews grow : vires acquirit eundo : it 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 increases like a snowball, by its own 
 motion. I believe that the weakest 
 man has will enough for his appointed 
 exigencies, if he but develope it as he 
 would develope a feeble body. To 
 that special end, moreover, are ad- 
 dressed the sacramental means of the 
 Church. But it is also terribly true 
 that the will, like the bodily thews, 
 can be atrophied by indolent disuse ; 
 and at the present time numbers of 
 men and women are suffering from 
 just this malady. " I cannot,'' waits 
 upon, " I tried not." The active 
 and stimulative, not the merely 
 surgical asceticism, which should 
 strike at this central evil of moder- 
 nity, is indeed a thing to seek. De- 
 manding so much sparing, so much 
 spurring; so much gentleness, so 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 The im- 
 mutable 
 mutable. 
 
 much unswervingness ; never so much 
 to be considered, and never exacting 
 more anxious consideration ; this 
 poor fool of a present body is indeed 
 a hard matter for the spiritual 
 physician to handle, yet not beyond 
 his power. The Church is ever 
 changing to front a changing world ; 
 et plus fa change, plus est la meme 
 chose. She brings forth out of her 
 treasuries new things and old even 
 as does that world to which she 
 ministers, which moves in circles, 
 though in widening circles. She is 
 so divinely adjusted to it, that nothing 
 can it truly need but she shall auto- 
 matically respond : the mere craving 
 of the world's infant lips suffices to 
 draw from her maternal and ever- 
 yielded bosom the milk. 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 59 
 
 So she is now proving, 
 
 with that insensible gradualness in 
 change, as of Nature's self, which 
 is her secret. When very persecution 
 has recognised the profound change 
 in men, and vindictiveness foregoes 
 the infliction of tortures which jus- 
 tice once held paternal amenities of 
 correction, it would be strange if so 
 tender a mother as the Church had 
 maintained the rigidities of a disci- 
 pline evolved for a race at once ruder 
 and hardier than ourselves. The 
 continual commutations of fasting 
 and other physical penances, in 
 present days, sufficiently attest the 
 contrary. Of that more intimately 
 discriminating relentingness which 
 must rest with the private director, 
 those letters of Archbishop Porter, 
 
6o 
 
 Health and Holiness 
 
 The 
 Church, 
 the 
 
 Heart of 
 Charity. 
 
 more than once quoted, furnish a 
 singularly commendable and sagacious 
 example. The degree to which the 
 current of a life is ruffled by the wind 
 of circumstance, coloured by its own 
 contained infirmities, and affected by 
 the nature of its source, has only in 
 these latter days begun to be realised 
 in all its profound extent. An age 
 which sees the apotheosis of the per- 
 sonal mode in literature, an age in 
 which self-revelations excite not im- 
 patience, but a tenacious interest 
 far from wholly ignoble or merely 
 curious, an age which has shifted its 
 preoccupation from the type to the 
 individual, naturally apprehends more 
 subtly these complexities of the indi- 
 vidual life. And the result is perhaps 
 even in that Church always the 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 61 
 
 very heart, and that priesthood always 
 the very members of charity a 
 charity one thought nearer to the 
 charity of the Eternal. For it is a 
 charity based on a more sensitive 
 delicacy of justice ; and He is arche- 
 typal Charity because He is arche- 
 typal Justice. 
 
 And if the maternal cares 
 
 of the Church be thus increased by 
 the frailty of the modern body, she 
 is not without maternal recompense. 
 We have thus far regarded that 
 profound change, so widely evident, 
 as though it were an unmixed evil. 
 But in all change, well looked into, 
 the germinal good out-vails the appa- 
 rent ill. A regard thus onesided 
 misses the most potent ally of the 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 Nature 
 
 the 
 
 Ascetic. 
 
 Church and ultimate stickler for 
 ascetic religion Nature. Nature, 
 which some say abhors asceticism, 
 in her larger and subtler processes 
 steadily befriends nay, enforces it. 
 A favourite employment of men is 
 the venting of these shallow libels on 
 Nature. They have called her foe 
 to chastity her, who ruthlessly 
 penalises its violation. No less, 
 looking largely back over human 
 history, I discern in her a pertina- 
 cious purpose to exalt the spirit by 
 the dematerialisation (if I may use 
 the phrase) of the body. Slow and 
 insensible, that purpose at length 
 bursts into light, so to speak, for 
 our present eyes. For all those signs 
 and symptoms, upon which I have 
 insisted even to weariness however 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 ill from the mere material stand- 
 point, what do they mean but the 
 gradual decline of the human animal, 
 the gradually ascending supremacy of 
 the spirit on the stubborn ruins of 
 the bodily fortress ; that we have, 
 by an advance evident from its very 
 pain 
 
 " Moved upward, working out the beast " ? 
 
 In one large word (is it 
 
 over-bold ?), Nature is doing for the 
 Church what each individual saint, 
 passionately anticipative, had for- 
 merly to do for himself. She is 
 macerating the body. 
 
 Look but back on the 
 
 past. Realise the riotous animality 
 of primitive man. Witness the 
 
6 4 
 
 Health and Holiness 
 
 Work- 
 ing out 
 the 
 
 amazing progenitive catalogue of 
 Jewish king after Jewish king, the 
 lengthening bede-roll of his wives : 
 then reflect that these men still 
 thirsted, with more than the thirst 
 of a second Charles or a Louis Bien- 
 Aime, after illicit waters. Or recall, 
 if you will, the two thousand wives 
 of Zinghiz Khan. Remember, from 
 a hundred evidences, that all the 
 passions of these men were on a like 
 turbulent scale ; and estimate the 
 distance to the British paterfamilias, 
 a law-abiding creature in every way, 
 who (according to the Shah's epi- 
 gram) prefers fifty years with one 
 wife to a hundred years with fifty 
 wives. A poor and sordid com- 
 parison enough, you may think he 
 is not an heroic figure, Mr. Smith of 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 the City but it measures a distance, 
 the better because no one imputes it 
 to him for a merit; and a distance 
 you have not thought to measure. 
 
 There is another measure 
 
 far nobler, deeper, less obvious. Its 
 two termini are Dante and St. Paul. 
 The teaching of St. Paul with regard 
 to marriage represents the eternal 
 mind of Christianity : out of it have 
 unfolded all the lilied blossom of 
 Christian wedlock and (by conse- 
 quence) Christian love. Yet the 
 spirit, the tone, of St. Paul concern- 
 ing marriage (with reverence be it 
 said) in our modern perspective 
 seems but a little way from that 
 of the heathenesse around him. 
 Doubtless there was a world between 
 
66 
 
 Health and Holiness 
 
 From 
 Paul to 
 Dante. 
 
 them, to the sense of his day ; but 
 in the perspective of nineteen hun- 
 dred years the gulf becomes a crevice. 
 To what silver spirals would climb 
 that spirit which he rooted fast in 
 dogma St. Paul could not foresee ; 
 and even yet has it put forth its 
 apex-bud ? For the Christian love- 
 poets it was left to incarnate the 
 spirit of waxing Christianity in regard 
 to that love which was the effluence 
 of the Pauline counsels. Thus it is 
 that the passage from the first great 
 Christian teacher to Dante is the 
 passage to "an ampler ether, a 
 diviner air " in the relations of man 
 and woman. And that transition is 
 the measure of a vast insensible 
 spiritualism bathing the very roots 
 of human society. 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 67 
 
 Along uncounted lines 
 
 you may follow up, with attentive 
 meditation, this steady working of 
 history towards the higher man, this 
 secret treaty between Nature and 
 her asserted antagonist, asceticism. 
 Constantly obscured, or seemingly 
 contradicted, in historic detail, in 
 particular periods, it becomes arrest- 
 ingly patent in a large and spatial 
 view. The existing valetudinarian- 
 ism of our overspent bodies is, I 
 would suggest, a mere stage in the 
 wider beneficent process. But are 
 the iniquitous potencies of the body 
 to be checked by the destruction of 
 all potency? a question to be asked. 
 It would be a poor world if the ulti- 
 mate issue were a mere stagnant 
 virtue, in which morality should 
 
68 
 
 Health and Holiness 
 
 Holiness 
 ener- 
 gises. 
 
 luxuriate like duckweed a middle- 
 class Eden of the respectabilities ; if 
 (after the saying of a departed Bishop) 
 we were to put off the old man 
 merely in order that we might put 
 on the old woman. But against that 
 prospect, against a remedy which 
 might justifiably be accounted worse 
 than the disease, comes in another 
 force the force of sanctity itself. 
 For holiness energises. The com- 
 monest of common taunts is that 
 of "idle monks," "lazy saints," and 
 the like. But most contrary to that 
 superficial taunt, a holy man was 
 never yet an idle man. The process 
 of sanctity, like the Egyptian em- 
 balmers, destroys only to preserve the 
 lustiness of the body, and a saintly 
 could never be an effete world. 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 69 
 
 Let us, again, look back 
 
 to the basis of Nature. In our times 
 Science has partially brought into day- 
 light the obscure physiology of the 
 will : we know that the will of one 
 man may heal or quicken the body 
 of another. We call it therapeutic 
 hypnotism ; and the long name con- 
 fers scientific orthodoxy on what was 
 a pestilent heresy. Nor only this : 
 we know, also, the possibility of self- 
 hypnotisation ; we know that a man's 
 own will can heal or quicken a man's 
 own self. Are not these the days of 
 Mrs. Eddy and " Christian Science," 
 and many another craziness which 
 is the over-seeding of this truth ? 
 Solely as a natural matter, by its 
 profound effect on the personality, 
 by its quickening of the will, sane- 
 
70 
 
 Health and Holiness 
 
 The 
 Divine 
 quicken- 
 ing. 
 
 fU. 
 
 tity (then) would produce a quicken- 
 ing of the body. But that is only 
 the basis, the physical basis of the 
 process. The body (I might say) is 
 immersed in the soul, as a wick is 
 dipped in oil ; and its flame of active 
 energy is increased or diminished by 
 the strength or weakness of the 
 fecundising soul. But this oil, this 
 soul, is enriched a hundredfold by 
 the infusion of the Holy Spirit ; the 
 human will is intensified by union 
 with the Divine Will; and for the 
 flame of human love or active energy 
 is substituted the intenser flame of 
 Divine Love or Divine Energy. 
 Rather, it is not a substitution; but 
 the higher is added to the lower, 
 the lesser augmented by and con- 
 tained within the greater. The 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 effective energies of the fleshly wick, 
 the body, are correspondingly and 
 immensely augmented. If self-hyp- 
 notisation have quickening power, 
 how life-giving must be that force 
 when the human is reinforced by the 
 Divine Will, the human soul gathered 
 into the Soul of all being ! In such 
 fashion is it that sanctity the de- 
 stroyer becomes sanctity the pre- 
 server ; and through the passes of 
 an ascetic death leads even the body, 
 on which its hand has lain so heavy, 
 into a resurrection of power. 
 
 This truth is written large 
 
 over the records of saintliness. The 
 energy of the saints has left every- 
 where its dents upon the world. 
 When these men, reviled for impot- 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 Sacred 
 
 and 
 
 secular 
 
 ence, have turned their half-disdainful 
 hand to tasks approved by the multi- 
 tude, they have borne away the palm 
 from the world in its own prized 
 exercises. Take, if you will, poetry. 
 In the facile forefront of lyric sub- 
 limity stand the Hebrew prophets : 
 not only unapproached, but the ex- 
 emplars to which the greatest en- 
 deavour after approach. The highest 
 praise of Milton, Dante, supreme 
 names of Christian secular song, is 
 to have captured spacious echoes of 
 these giants' solitary song. In so far, 
 then, and from one of their aspects, 
 these great poets are derivative ; and 
 could not so have written without 
 their sacred models. Yet the He- 
 brew prophets wrote without design 
 of adding to the world's poetry, with- 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 73 
 
 out purpose of poetic fame, intent 
 only on their message (unblessed 
 word, yet "an excellent good word 
 till it was ill-sorted ") : they thought 
 only of the kingdom of God, and 
 " all these things were added unto 
 them " ! Or consider, in another 
 field of human endeavour, St. Augus- 
 tine. Throughout his brilliant youth 
 he was simply a rhetorician of his 
 day; a dazzling rhetorician, a noted 
 rhetorician, but he produced nothing 
 of permanence, and might have passed 
 from the ken of posterity as com- 
 pletely as the many noted rhetori- 
 cians who were his contemporaries. 
 He rose to literary majesty and an 
 authentic immortality only when he 
 rose to sanctity. Yet those works 
 which still defy time were the by- 
 
74 
 
 Health and Holiness 
 
 nci- 
 iental 
 greatness. 
 
 product of an active episcopal life, 
 life of affairs which would have 
 soaked in the energies of most men. 
 With like incidentalness Francis of 
 Assisi sang his Hymn to the Sun, 
 that other Francis of Sales wrote 
 his delightful French prose, John of 
 the Cross poured out those mystical 
 poems which are among the treasur- 
 able things of Spanish literature, and 
 unforgotten prose works besides ; all 
 in the leisure hours of lives which 
 had no leisure hours, lives which to 
 most men would have been death. 
 
 For holiness not merely 
 
 energises, not merely quickens; one 
 might almost say it prolongs life 
 By its Divine reinforcement of the 
 will and the energies, it wrings from 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 75 
 
 the body the uttermost drop of ser- 
 vice ; so that, if it can postpone dis- 
 solution, it averts age, it secures vital 
 vigour to the last. It prolongs that 
 life of the faculties, without which 
 age is the foreshadow of the coming 
 eclipse. These men, in whom is the 
 indwelling of the Author of life, 
 scarce know the meaning of decrepi- 
 tude : they are constantly familiar 
 with the suffering, but not the palsy 
 of mortality. Regard Manning, an 
 unfaltering power, a pauseless energy, 
 till the grave gripped him ; yet a " bag 
 of bones." That phrase, the reproach 
 of emaciation, is the gibe flung at the 
 saints; but these "bags of bones" 
 have a vitality which sleek world- 
 lings might envy. St. Francis of 
 Assisi is a flame of active love 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 We are 
 
 always 
 young." 
 
 to the end, despite his confessed 
 ill-usage of " Brother Ass," despite 
 emaciation, despite ceaseless labour, 
 despite the daily haemorrhage from 
 his Stigmata. In all these men you 
 witness the same striking spectacle ; 
 in all these men, nay, and in all these 
 women. Sex and fragility matter 
 not: these flames burn till the candle 
 is consumed utterly. " We are always 
 young," said the Egyptian priests to 
 the Greek emissaries ; and the Saints 
 might repeat the boast, did they not 
 disdain boasting. It was on the in- 
 stinctive knowledge of this, on the 
 generous confidence they might trust 
 the Creator with his creation, that the 
 Saints based the stern handling of the 
 body which some of them afterwards 
 allowed to have been excessive. For 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 77 
 
 though the oil can immensely energise 
 and prolong the life of the wick, it 
 is on that corporeal wick, after all, 
 that the flame of active energy de- 
 pends. The fire is conditioned by 
 the fleshly fuel. No energy can re- 
 place the substance of energy; and 
 while some impoverishment is a neces- 
 sity of ascetic preparation, waste is a 
 costly waste. For, even as a beast of 
 burthen, this sore-spent body is a 
 Golden Ass. 
 
 But with all tender and 
 
 wise allowance (and in these pages 
 I have not been slack of allowance), 
 it remains as it was said : " He that 
 loseth his life for Me shall find it." 
 The remedy for modern lassitude 
 of body, for modern weakness of 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 Holiness, 
 
 the 
 
 talisman. 
 
 will, is Holiness. There alone is 
 the energising principle from which 
 the modern world persists in divorc- 
 ing itself. If " this body of death " 
 be, in ways of hitherto undreamed 
 subtlety, a clog upon the spirit, it 
 is no less true that the spirit can lift 
 up the body. In the knowledge of 
 the body's endless interplay with the 
 spirit, of the subtle inter-relations be- 
 tween this father and daughter, this 
 husband and wife, this pair whose 
 bond is at once filial and marital, we 
 have grown paralysingly learned in 
 late days. But our knowledge is 
 paralysing because it is one-sided. 
 Of the body's reactions and com- 
 mand upon the spirit we know far 
 indeed from all, yet fearfully much. 
 Of the potency, magisterial, benevo- 
 
Health and Holiness 
 
 79 
 
 lent, even tyrannous, which goes forth 
 from the spirit upon the body we 
 have but young knowledge. Never- 
 theless it is in rapid act of blossoming. 
 Hypnotism, faith-healing, radium 
 all these, of such seeming multiple 
 divergence, are really concentrating 
 their rays upon a common centre. 
 When that centre is at length di- 
 vined, we shall have scientific witness, 
 demonstrated certification, to the 
 commerce between body and spirit, 
 the regality of will over matter. To 
 the blind tyranny of flesh upon spirit 
 will then visibly be opposed the serene 
 and sapient awe of spirit upon flesh. 
 Then will lie open the truth which 
 now we can merely point to by 
 plausibilities and fortify by instance : 
 that Sanctity is medicinal, Holiness 
 
8o 
 
 Health and Holiness 
 
 holiness 
 Health ? 
 
 a healer, from Virtue goes out vir- 
 tue, in the love of God is more than 
 solely ethical sanity. For the feeble- 
 ness of a world seeking some mater- 
 nal hand to which it may cling a 
 wise asceticism is remedial. 
 
 Health, I have well-nigh 
 
 said, is Holiness. What if Holiness 
 be Health ? Two sides of one truth. 
 In their co-ordination and embrace 
 resides the rounded answer. It is 
 that embrace of body and spirit, Seen 
 and Unseen, to which mortality, 
 sagging but pertinacious, unalterably 
 tends. 
 
 TlBl 
 
 OFl 
 
 UNIVERSil 
 
 OF 
 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 BERKELEY 
 
 
 
 Return to desk from which borrowed. 
 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
 JUN 
 
 5Apr'57 
 
 REC'D LD 
 
 MAYS 1957 
 
 11 
 
 LD 21-100m-9,'48(B399sl6)476 
 
VA 03985