em or not. He was very old when I first came to know him, and his
body so attenuated that it seemed formed of nothing so much as of so
many roots of trees. With all this sanctity he was very affable. He
never spoke unless he was questioned, but his intellectual
right-mindedness and grace gave to all his words an irresistible charm."

[217] F. Max Muller: Ramakrishna, his Life and sayings, 1899, p. 180.

[218] Oldenberg: Buddha; translated by W. Hoey, London, 1882, p. 127.

We find accordingly that as ascetic saints have grown older, and
directors of conscience more experienced, they usually have shown a
tendency to lay less stress on special bodily mortifications. Catholic
teachers have always professed the rule that, since health is needed
for efficiency in God's service, health must not be sacrificed to
mortification. The general optimism and healthy-mindedness of liberal
Protestant circles to-day makes mortification for mortification's sake
repugnant to us. We can no longer sympathize with cruel deities, and
the notion that God can take delight in the spectacle of sufferings
self-inflicted in his honor is abhorrent. In consequence of all these
motives you probably are disposed, unless some special utility can be
shown in some individual's discipline, to treat the general tendency to
asceticism as pathological.

Yet I believe that a more careful consideration of the whole matter,
distinguishing between the general good intention of asceticism and the
uselessness of some of the particular acts of which it may be guilty,
ought to rehabilitate it in our esteem. For in its spiritual meaning
asceticism stands for nothing less than for the essence of the
twice-born philosophy. It symbolizes, lamely enough no doubt, but
sincerely, the belief that there is an element of real wrongness in
this world, which is neither to be ignored nor evaded, but which must
be squarely met and overcome by an appeal to the soul's heroic
resources, and neutralized and cleansed away by suffering. As against
this view, the ultra-optimistic form of the once-born philosophy thinks
we may treat evil by the method of ignoring. Let a man who, by
fortunate health and circumstances, escapes the suffering of any great
amount of evil in his own person, also close his eyes to it as it
exists in the wider universe outside his private experience, and he
will be quit of it altogether, and can sail through life happily on a
healthy-minded b