m food and wine and raiment and all the satisfactions of sense
is to be compared with the glory that may be revealed at any moment in
thy soul? Subdue that bestial and voracious body, ever seeking to
extinguish in thee the gleam of heavenly fire. Press the spikes into the
lumpish and uncouth monster of thy flesh. Remember! Remember thou art
God."

"Oh, wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this
death?" We have grown so accustomed to the cry that we hardly notice it,
and yet that the cry should ever have been raised--that it should have
arisen in all ages and in widely separated parts of the world--is the
most remarkable thing in history. Pleasure is so agreeable, and none too
common; or, if one wanted pain for salt, are there not pains enough in
life's common round? Does it not take us all our time to mitigate the
cold, the heat, and hunger; to escape the beasts and rocks and
thunderbolts that bite and break and blast us; to cure the diseases that
rack and burn and twist our poor bodies into hoops? Why should we seek
to add pain to pain, and raise a wretched life to the temperature of a
torture-room? It is the most extraordinary thing, at variance alike with
the laws of reason and moderation. Certainly, there is a kind of
self-denial--a carefulness in the selection of pleasure--which all the
wise would practise. To exercise restraint, to play the aristocrat in
fastidious choice, to guard against satiety, and allow no form of
grossness to enter the walled garden or to drink at the fountain
sealed--those are to the wise the necessary conditions of calm and
radiant pleasure, and in outward behaviour the Epicurean and the Stoic
are hardly to be distinguished. For the Epicurean knows well that
asceticism stands before the porch of happiness, and the smallest touch
of excess brings pleasure tumbling down.

But mankind seems not to trouble itself about this delicate adjustment,
this cautious selection of the more precious joy. In matters of the
soul, man shows himself unreasonable and immoderate. He forgets the laws
of health and chastened happiness. The salvation of his spirit possesses
him with a kind of frenzy, making him indifferent to loss of pleasure,
or to actual pain and bodily distress. He will seek out pain as a lover,
and use her as a secret accomplice in his conspiracy against the body's
domination. Under the stress of spiritual passion he becomes an
incalculable force, carried we know not