Nerves and the war

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

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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-JlO

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,
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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.
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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

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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
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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

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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.
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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.
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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 Shock1

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.

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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
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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
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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-
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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 ?
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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-
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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
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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
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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

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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
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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
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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-
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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
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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 !"
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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

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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,
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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

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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.
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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,
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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
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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-
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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 corry not to remember the
exact words, for the dignity and beauty
of them impressed me deeply. This

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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

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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

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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
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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
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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
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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,

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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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 Health1

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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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-
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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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
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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-
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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

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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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

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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
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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"
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.

THE END

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