And of all this the entire working class of the nation is systematically deprived! Formerly it was only in cases of extreme poverty, where the crowded lodging was an altogether unfit place to nurse the sufferer, that recourse was had to the public Hospitals. Now it has become the invariable practice the moment that illness, even of non-infectious kind, declares itself, to send straight away to the hospital artisans, small tradesmen, and farmers from their own comfortable abodes, servants from the large and airy houses where they have labored faithfully, and even children from their mothers’ arms. It is not a mere matter of conjecture that such a custom must do harm and weaken the sense of family obligation. It is a fact that it has done so already, and is doing so more every day. Sons and daughters place their blind and palsied parents in asylums; wives send their husbands in a decline to Brompton Hospital; and it has become a surprising piece of filial devotion if a daughter remain at home to take care of a bed-ridden mother, even when her means fully permit of such sacrifice of time. What deadly injury is all this to the hearts of men, women, and children!
Of course Hospitals have their important uses. No one denies it. Some cases of disease and some degrees of poverty require such institutions. But this does not justify the monstrous over-use of them now in vogue. Even for the class whose homes are too crowded to admit of nursing being properly or safely done in them, I cannot but think that small Cottage Hospitals, where the wife or mother or daughter would be free to perform her natural duties by the bedside, and where she would be shown how best to perform them, would be infinitely preferable for every reason, moral and physical, to our present Palaces of Pain. Excellent also in all ways will be the plan of Nurses provided for the poor in their own homes by the Queen’s wise gift of the balance of her Women’s Jubilee Fund. The secret of the excessive resort to Hospitals is of course the encouragement to patients given by the medical schools attached to them, for the sake of obtaining a large supply of “clinical material.”
Lastly, we come to speak of the Education of the Religious Emotions. We have already referred to the outbursts of contagious enthusiasm in the Crusades and Revivals. It remains to say a few words respecting the various sources of religious emotion, at first and second hand.
A fundamental difference between the Catholic and Puritan mind seems to be that the former seizes on every available means for producing religious emotion through the senses; the latter turns away from such means with intense mistrust, and limits itself to appeals through the mind. Dark and solemn churches like that at Assisi decorated by Giotto (which the friar who showed it told me was the “best place in the whole world for prayer”), gorgeous altars, splendid functions, pictures, music, incense,—all these are to the Catholic and High Churchman veritable “means of grace”; i.e., they call out in them emotions which either are religious or they think lead to religion. Long Prayers, Hymns, Bible-readings, and preachings,—these, on the other hand, are the Evangelicals’ means of grace, and they produce in them emotions distinctly religious. We must, I think, treat these differences as matters of spiritual taste, concerning which it is proverbially idle to dispute. Both have their advantages, and both their great perils: the Catholic method has the peril of lapping the soul in a fool’s paradise of fancied piety, which is only sensuous excitement; the Puritan method has that of creating the hysteria of a Revival. In each case it is the contagion of the emotion of a multitude which creates the danger. Solitary religious emotion, either produced by the glory and majesty of Nature or by lonely prayer and communings with God, can lead to no evil; nay, is the climax of purest joy vouchsafed to man. Not misguided are those who enter into their chambers and shut the door “to pray to Him who sees in secret,” or who go up into the hills and woods
“To seek
That Being in whose honor shrines are weak,
Upreared by human hands.”
The converse of the emotions of Awe and Reverence—namely, the tendency to jest and ridicule—are supposed by some to be dangerous enemies to religion. I do not believe they are so. I think a genuine sense of humor and a keen eye for the ludicrous is a most precious protection against absurdities and excesses. Like Tenderness and Strength, the sense of the Sublime and of the Ridiculous are complementary to each other, and exist only in perfection together in the same character. It is the man who cannot laugh who never weeps.
Finally, we reach the point where the religious emotions, produced either alone or by contagion, effect the greatest of spiritual miracles: that “conversion” or revulsion of the soul which ancient India, no less than Christendom, likened to a New or Second Birth. It would appear that, when this mysterious change does not take place by the solitary work of the Divine on the human spirit, it does so by the attractive power of another human soul, which has itself already undergone the great transformation. It is the living Saint who conveys spiritual life. He need not be a very great or far advanced soul in the spiritual realm. Many a simple person with no exceptional gifts has “turned to the wisdom of the just” the hearts of strong men, whom the most eloquent and thoughtful of preachers have failed to move by a hair. But the greater the saint, the greater naturally must be his power. It was the contagion of Divine Love, caught from him who felt it most of all the sons of men, which moved the little band in the upper chamber of Jerusalem—who moved the world.
It is worthy of notice that when a man so powerfully influences another as to “convert” him in the true sense, i.e. to bring him to the higher spiritual life, it very often happens that at the same time he “converts” him in the lower sense, to the doctrines of the special Church to which he himself belongs. The man has received the impulse of religion from that particular direction. It has come to him colored by the hues of his friend’s piety, and he accepts it, doctrines and all, as he finds it. The matter has been one of emotional contagion, not of critical argument on either side.