“Chiefly by prayer and meditation,” he replied after a short pause.
He used the old-fashioned expressions which I had not heard from the lips of any Meccanian before. “But it is difficult,” he went on, “to keep one’s faith, cut off from one’s fellow-believers.”
“But they allow you to attend religious services surely?” I said.
“The Meccanian State Church keeps a chaplain here, and holds a service every day which is attended by all the officials and a few of the patients; but you have heard the maxim Cujus regio ejus religio, have you not?” I nodded. “It has acquired a new significance during the last fifty years. I have not attended any of the services since they ceased to be compulsory about ten years ago.”
“That sounds very remarkable,” I said.
“What does?”
“It is the first time I have heard of anything ceasing to be compulsory in Meccania,” I said.
“The fact was that they discovered it had a very bad effect upon the disease. My chief relief now is reading, which is permitted for three hours a day.”
“And you are allowed to choose your own books?”
“As a concession to our mental infirmity,” he said, “we have been granted the privilege of reading some of the old authors. It came about in this way. Dr. Weakling, who is in charge of this hospital, is the son of one of my oldest friends—a man who spent several years in this place as a patient. He came in about the same time as I did, but his health gave way and he ‘recanted,’ or, as they say, he ‘recovered.’ But while he was here he begged to have a few of the old books to save him from going mad. The authorities refused to let him have any books except those specially provided, and I believe it was this that made him give way. Anyhow he used his influence with his son afterwards, for his son had become one of the leading medical specialists, to obtain for the older patients at any rate a number of the books of the old literature which nobody else wanted to read. He only got the concession through on the ground that it was a psychological experiment. He has had to write a report on the experiment every year since its introduction. That is our greatest positive privilege, but we have a few negative privileges.”