Health and Holiness

This work begins: "This is an age when everywhere the rights of the weaker against the stronger are being examined and asserted; the rights of labour against capital, of subjects against their rulers, of wives against their husbands, the lower creation against its irresponsible master, man. Is it coincidence merely, that the protest of the body against the tyranny of the spirit is also audible and even hearkened? Within the Church itself, which has ever fostered the claims of the oppressed against the oppressor, a mild and rational appeal has made itself heard. For the body is the spouse of the spirit, and the democratic element in the complex state of man. In the very courts of the spirit the claims might we say the rights of the body are being tolerantly judged. "It was not so once. The body had no rights against her husband, the spirit. One might say, she had no marital rights: she was a squaw, a hewer of wood and drawer of water for her heaven-born mate. Did she rebel, she was to be starved into submission. Was she slack in obedience, she was to be punished by the infliction of further tasks. Did she groan tha t things were beyond her strength, she was goaded into doing them, while the tyrannous spirit bitterly exclaimed on her slovenly performance. To overdrive a donkey was barbarous: to over-drive one's own lawful body a meritorious act." Later on we read: "For holiness not merely energises, not merely quickens; one might almost say it prolongs life. By its Divine reinforcement of the will and the energies, it wrings from the body the uttermost drop of service; so that, if it can postpone dissolution, it averts age, it secures vital vigour to the last. It prolongs that life of the faculties, without which age is the foreshadow of the coming eclipse. These men, in whom is the indwelling of the Author of life, scarce know the meaning of decrepitude: they are constantly familiar with the suffering, but not the palsy of mortality. Regard Manning, an unfaltering power, a pauseless energy, till the grave gripped him; yet a " bag of bones." That phrase, the reproach of emaciation, is the gibe flung at the sain ts; bu t these "bags of bones" have a vitality which sleek worldlings might envy. St. Francis of Assisi is a flame of active love to the end, despite his confessed ill-usage of "Brother Ass," despite emaciation, despite ceaseless labour, despite the daily hremorrhage from his Stigmata. In all these men you witness the same striking spectacle; in all these men, nay, and in all these women. Sex and fragility matter not: these flames burn till the candle is consumed utterly."