The priests
represented the great danger which accompanied this physical training
without moral culture, and there is no doubt that they were right to a
certain degree. Give a man only supreme physical education, without any
attention to the moral and intellectual, and he will go to pieces like
our prize-fighters and athletes. But the Christians went to the other
extreme. They practiced the most absurd system of asceticism, depriving
themselves of natural food and rest, and, of course, the results which
followed on a grand scale were just what would follow in the individual.
Let a person follow the course they did, denying himself necessary
raiment and food, taking no exercise, and living in retirement, and
nervous prostration will follow, and hysterical disturbances and
troubles. This result in the individual was found on a large scale
throughout Christendom. The idea that the Christians brought down from
the very earliest dawn of Christianity, that the body and soul are
distinct, and that whatever is done to mortify the flesh increases the
spiritual, life, has a grain of truth in it. There were men in our army
who, half-starved, marched through the Southern swamps in a state of
exaltation. They imagined they were walking through floral gardens, with
birds flitting about and singing overhead. But it was an unnatural,
morbid state. So priests deprived themselves of food, and reduced
themselves to the lowest extent physically, and then saw visions; and
were in an exalted mental state.
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