individual machine or
organism, has its own best conditions of efficiency. A given machine
will run best under a certain steam-pressure, a certain amperage; an
organism under a certain diet, weight, or exercise. You seem to do
best, I heard a doctor say to a patient, at about 140 millimeters of
arterial tension. And it is just so with our sundry souls: some are
happiest in calm weather; some need the sense of tension, of strong
volition, to make them feel alive and well. For these latter souls,
whatever is gained from day to day must be paid for by sacrifice and
inhibition, or else it comes too cheap and has no zest.

Now when characters of this latter sort become religious, they are apt
to turn the edge of their need of effort and negativity against their
natural self; and the ascetic life gets evolved as a consequence.

When Professor Tyndall in one of his lectures tells us that Thomas
Carlyle put him into his bath-tub every morning of a freezing Berlin
winter, he proclaimed one of the lowest grades of asceticism. Even
without Carlyle, most of us find it necessary to our soul's health to
start the day with a rather cool immersion. A little farther along the
scale we get such statements as this, from one of my correspondents, an
agnostic:--

"Often at night in my warm bed I would feel ashamed to depend so on the
warmth, and whenever the thought would come over me I would have to get
up, no matter what time of night it was, and stand for a minute in the
cold, just so as to prove my manhood."

Such cases as these belong simply to our head 1. In the next case we
probably have a mixture of heads 2 and 3-- the asceticism becomes far
more systematic and pronounced. The writer is a Protestant, whose
sense of moral energy could doubtless be gratified on no lower terms,
and I take his case from Starbuck's manuscript collection.

"I practiced fasting and mortification of the flesh. I secretly made
burlap shirts, and put the burrs next the skin, and wore pebbles in my
shoes. I would spend nights flat on my back on the floor without any
covering."

The Roman Church has organized and codified all this sort of thing, and
given it a market-value in the shape of "merit." But we see the
cultivation of hardship cropping out under every sky and in every
faith, as a spontaneous need of character. Thus we read of Channing,
when first settled as a Unitarian minister, that--

"He was now more simple than ever, and seemed