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Modern psychology, which sets a new scientific sanction upon so many primitive customs, affords ample justification for the taboo put upon the sudden utterance of words of evil import. The warning maxim of the Greeks, "Euphemai," was not merely as it has sometimes been held, a weak superstition, based on a fetish notion that bad words possessed some magical power to fulfil their meaning. It surely marked some recognition of the potency of suggestion, and of the injury done by setting the mind to brood on thoughts of evil.

Christian Scientists are indisputably right in their insistence on the value of presenting to the mind positive conceptions of health, goodness, beauty, power, repose, and in drawing the thoughts and the emotions away from disease, wickedness, discord, weakness and unrest. It is true that in their zeal to redress the balance of bad habits they overload their doctrine by attempting to deny the reality of evil; a verbal jugglery which really defeats its end, causing disappointment and defection in over-sanguine zealots when one of these "unrealities" attempts vigorous to reassert itself. But, in spite of this extravagance, which belongs to the militant stage of every propagandism, the cultivation of the habit of

dwelling upon good, wholesome, and beautiful images is so obvious a counsel of wisdom, that one is disposed to wonder why it is necessary to elevate it into a doctrine, and to organize it as a practice.

The answer to this question is furnished by the title of the latest volume which has flowed from the prolific pen of Dr. Saleeby, "Worry: the Disease of the Age" (Cassell & Co.). The author, at the outset of his treatment, does well to remind us that worry is not only "a state of mind," but also a state of body. Eupeptic, easy-going, matterof-fact people are apt to dismiss all ailments affecting the temper, the spirits, or the disposition, not accompanied by utter physical collapse, as imaginary evils, to be got rid of by an effort of the will. It is idle to endeavor to convert such placid materialists of their double error: first, in ignoring the bodily side of the disorder; second, in imputing to the will some self-acting power it does not possess. The case of hysteria is typical. "The patient says 'I cannot'; his friends say 'he will not'; the truth is 'He cannot will.'"

What is worry, and why is it distinctive of our age? The tendency for a writer, who has a whole volume at his disposal, to expatiate and to lose himself in the wider implications and sur

roundings of his theme is almost irresistible, and Dr. Saleeby has sometimes succumbed to it. That worry has some close congeners there is no doubt. It might even be worth while to trace the subtle bonds of sense and sound which associate it with such kindred terms as "hurry," "flurry," and "scurry." But to enlarge its significance so as to cover almost every anxiety, good or evil, normal or abnormal, is an injury to a word that is wanted for the limited use to which it is commonly put. Worry, when chronic and general, may doubtless pass into "depression," or even into pessimism; "taking trouble" for some good or desired end involves an eagerness and assiduity of mind which resembles worrying: fears about a future life and other things invisible may certainly be sources of worry. But to designate any of these mental attitudes worry is, we venture to assert, to stretch injuriously its meaning. Especially do we protest against the suggestion that "worry," when directed to a good end, may be "normal," and justified in reason.

Worry is always a waste, always a disease. Physically, it is traceable in drawn features, short breathing, tense bearing, irregular quick movements. Mentally, it is distinguishable as a vicious circle of the intellect and the emotions, thought and feeling futilely rotating about some single object set out of focus. Worry always implies false judgment. Sometimes a trifling difficulty or risk swells to a mountain; some little business loss, some slight personal affront or passing ailment is bloated out by apprehension until it occupies the mind, becomes a fixed idea, even an obsession. The mind "worries" it like a meatless bone, getting no nutriment, yet unable to relinquish it. When there is no irritant at hand, worry finds or invents its object, setting the imagination to fabricate troubles and grievances out of any

casual material of life. The term "morbid self-consciousness" does not carry far as an explanation. Many of the best and most unselfish persons we know are in a constant worry about their children, their friends, even their country. Such anxiety or apprehension as relates to matters of real weight for which we have some true responsibility cannot be regarded as "worry"; this sort of emotion, rightly measured and directed, is a prophylactic evolved for the preservation of the individual and the race. Worry is essentially irrational. Hence the folly of trying to argue with its victim. While it implies false or exaggerated ideas, its true nature is emotional. Now it is the emotions that are the most obvious meeting-ground of the flesh and the spirit. It is quite evident that the "solar plexus," or whatever the controlling centre of the nervous system be called, influences the purely cerebral operations much more potently than it is influenced by them; in a word, the emotions bulk far more largely than the reason in the practical determination of our lives. Reason is a good deal of an impostor, pretending to a ninety per cent. control over civilized man, whereas the true measure of its power is perhaps five per cent.

It is only by thus recognizing the comparative independence of our emotional system that we can hope to deal with worry. What is wanted is the restoration of the "organic sense of well-being." Animals have it; they do not indulge in wasteful apprehensions or "whine about their sins." Infants have it; even children are always taught to worry by parents, pastors, masters, and other persons set in evil authority over them, whose example corrupts the primal instincts of an easy mind.

It is generally conceded that "worry" is a growing evil of our times. There are those who think it a fruit of over

cerebration which stimulates excessively the emotional centres while robbing the ordinary motor and sensory system of its normal work. Though Dr. Saleeby dogmatically denies the possibility of overworking the brain, the prevalence of "nerves" among the professional and other intellectual classes gives a strong prima facie support to the hypothesis; and the view, powerfully urged, among others, by Dr. Nordau, that the rapidity and multiplicity of changes which each decade brings in the material and intellectual environment has over-taxed the capacity of mental and emotional adjustment, is not lightly to be dismissed. It is indeed quite evident that the rapid, changeful, and unstable life of the modern city is breeding an impulsive, emotional, and anxious people, whose hurried, gaunt, and tight-set faces are very far removed from "the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movement of animals," and who are habitually disobedient to the Gospel prohibition of worry, which is so ill-translated: "Take no thought for the morrow."

There are two schools for the curative treatment of this "disease of the age," one approaching it from the physical, the other from the spiritual side. The one prescribes periods of complete bodily rest, massage, exercises in the art of recovering repose; the other, to which allusion has already

The Nation.

been made, seeks to organize the emotional life so as to win an atmosphere of permanent inner tranquility for the soul, the true service of religion to this life of man.

But to our mind there is something suspicious and unsatisfactory in the artificiality of these organized, elaboiated cures. The rest cure and the soothing patter of Christian Science are not adequate. Dr. Saleeby gets nearer to the heart of the trouble when he diagnoses it as "practical materialism." It is false valuations of life, repre. sented in and fostered by our too distinctively industrial struggle, and stamped by this diseased environment upon the plastic nature of our children so that they grow up into hardened men and women "of the world"-this is the enemy of mankind. The savage, who knows not whether or how he may get food to-morrow to keep himself and his family alive, does not worry: no nation ever possessed so abundant and so sure a command of food as ours, no nation ever worried more. Here is the paradox. It can only be solved by paying heed to the criticism which a sage belonging to one of those Oriental nations whom we are trying to "civilize" passed upon us after an exhaustive study of our science, our political institutions, our games and our religions: "You do not cultivate your soul."

THE MIND OF CHRIST.

Professor Harnack has published a new book in conjunction with Professor Herrmann ("Essays on the Social Gospel," Williams and Norgate, 4s. 6d.), a large section of which deals with "The Real Mind of Jesus." There can be no doubt that the theological interest of the modern layman centres more

and more round the mind of Christ. The laity are troubling themselves less and less about the mind of the Church, though allusions to it are still frequent in pietistic literature. Few care to learn when the Church began to say this or to think the other, or to trace the development of such-and-such a dogma

from its suggestion to its full definition. The Councils are regarded by most ordinary men as historical rather than as religious landmarks, and they are scarcely prepared to accept the via media of many of the reformers, who, while denying their authority, nevertheless accepted their conclusions, rebasing these conclusions upon certain sentences of Holy Scripture which seem nowadays hardly able to support their weight. There is little life left in the controversies of the past. The professional theologian alone can fix his mind upon them. But the spirit

of Christ continues to "draw all men.” "Who hath known the mind of the Lord? . . . But we have the mind of Christ," said St. Paul; and again, “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus"; and the words of the great Apostle are ringing in the ears of the present generation. Perhaps never since Paul was martyred have they sounded so insistently. In the Middle Ages the bulwarks of dogma arose so fast around the Divine Figure as often to obscure it altogether from the wayfaring man, and at the time of the Reformation the mists of controversy replaced the shadows of the past.

In the days of our grandfathers the ordinary religious man, the man who went to church and read the Bible at stated intervals, thought very little about the character of Christ; he might even have thought that the phrase had a heterodox sound. If he were an Evangelical, his faith rested upon the Atonement; if a High Churchman, upon the efficacy of the Sacraments. Nowadays, whatever denomination he may belong to, the ordinary man, if he thinks about his religion at all, thinks first about the mind of Christ, about the attitude towards life and towards death of the Founder of his faith. He reads his Gospels, not in order to confirm a catechism or illustrate a creed,

or even in order to acquire merit. He reads that he may learn "the way of God more perfectly," that he may make for himself a conception of the Christian revelation. Such a change in the focus of religious thought can hardly be without far-reaching results. Even in the Roman Church we see the influence of the new spirit. Christ has become once more the centre of Christianity, the Christ of the Gospels, not the Divine Child of latter-day Romanism or the sacrificial Lamb of an ultraProtestant theology, but He who "spake as never man spake." We are entering upon a fresh religious phase, but as yet we have no religious enthusiasm. New altars have been prepared, but no fire has descended from heaven. What will happen when the spark comes, for come it must? Every period of religious doubt has been followed by a religious revival. What will be the effect upon Christendom if the mind of the faithful, now concentrated upon the mind of Christ, is once more "endowed with power from on high"? Nothing is less likely than the sudden coming of the millennium. The religious world will not become Christlike all in a moment. Where individuals are concerned the rate of moral and religious progress cannot be caiculated with any approach to accuracy; but taking men in the aggregate, it seems to be in the order of Providence that all progress should be gradual. Every revival is a Second Coming, and in every revival the sad words of our Lord once more prove themselves. He who prayed that His followers might all be as one foresaw how many were the struggles to be gone through before that prayer could be fulfilled. Men would be "set at variance," He said, by the new doctrine. Those of one household would find themselves in intense opposition. It is not possible for men to meditate freely, and without fear of coming to unauthorized conclu

sions, upon the character of Christ, and remain altogether satisfied with the social status quo; and human nature is such that the conscientiously dissatisfied seek refuge in a new system. How did Christ look at wealth? the student of Christ's character cannot but ask himself. What was His attitude towards those who take the sword? Why, in apparent contradiction to His dictum upon the subject. did He say there were times when a man who had two coats should sell one for a weapon? What was His attitude towards commerce, and why did He uphold the rights of contract with such tremendous sternness? Why did He seem at times verily and in deed to reprove the world, not only for sin, but. as St. John said, for righteousness? With what extraordinary severity certain typical sinners are dealt with in the parables and what wonderful kindness is shown to others. Dives lifts up his eyes in torment because he was indifferent to the suffering and the sickness of the poor, and no mercy is shown towards the overseer who became in his master's absence a tyraut over his fellow-servants. On the other hand, the young man who repented his riotous life is met by his father while he is yet a great way off. The Pharisee whose heart was not right before God is condemned, though there is no reason to suppose that his own estimate of his outward respectability was a false one, while the publican is justified by his repentance alone. When the servant is condemned for exacting money owing to him at a moment when his own debt had been cancelled, the righteousness of his claim is not even taken into consideration. A rough-andready justice on the part of the man in authority is distinctly held up to admiration, while in the Sermon on the Mount we are told at all costs to avoid retribution. If we refuse to look at the Gospel as a whole and to use our

reason-if we insist on making of Christ what He distinctly refused to be, a ruler and judge, instead of the Light of the World-we may set up tyrannies as bad as, or worse than, those instituted by Roman dogmatism. There will be no new Torquemadas, but how much suffering may not be caused by a new Tolstoy.

Upon isolated sentences of Jesus absolutely conflicting systems may be erected, and a measure of fanaticism is natural to man. The object of Professor Harnack and Professor Herrmann's book is to warn men against the dangers of this new turn of religious thought. They have convinced themselves that the Gospel contains no economic programme. Only, they say, if it be regarded as a legal code can social and political laws be found in it. Christ was no legalist, but "He who emancipates the conscience." Chris tianity is the religion of liberty, and "its duties are specially imposed upon you, and upon me, and upon every age as an individual problem for each to solve." Christianity as a religion, they say, would be at an end if the Gospel were changed into a social manifesto. It cannot be forced into a system, and no system, however literally carried out, would satisfy the aspirations of man. "The living God of the conscience is inexorable in His demand that we ought to do what, in our own conscience, we recognize as perfection," for "a man can do what is good only if his will is directed towards the pursuit of truth, as he perceives it." The tendency of the human mind to dogmatize will not die because men have ceased to think dogma the most vital part of Christianity. It is possible so to interpret the words of Christ as to overthrow the fabric of civilization and to cause His name to be blasphemed among the Gentiles, these two liberal theologians plead, and surely their warning is

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