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 where by his determination to preserve his soul, to keep alight just that little spark of fire, to save that little breath of life from stifling under the mass of superincumbent fat.  We may call him crazy, inhuman, a fanatic, a devil-worshipper; he does not mind what we call him.  His eyes are full of a vision before which the multitude of human possessions fade.  He is engaged in a contest wherein his soul must either overcome or perish everlastingly; and we may suppose that, even if the soul were not immortal, it would still be worth the saving.

It is true that in this happy country examples of ascetic frenzy are comparatively rare.  There is little fear of overdoing the mortification of the flesh.  We practise a self-denial that takes the form of training for sport, but, like the spectators at a football match, we do our asceticism chiefly by proxy, and are fairly satisfied if the clergy do not drink or give other cause for scandal.  It is very seldom that Englishmen have been affected by spiritual passion of any kind, and that is why our country, of all the eastern hemisphere, has been least productive of saints.  But still, in the midst of our discreet comfort and sanity of moderation, that spiky bracelet of steel, eating into the flesh of the courtly and sumptuous Archbishop, may help to remind us that, whether in war, or art, or life, it is only by the passionate refusal of comfort and moderation that the high places of the spirit are to be reached.  “Still be ours the diet hard, and the blanket on the ground!” is the song of all pioneers, and if man is to be but a little lower than the angels, and crowned with glory and honour, the crown will be made of iron or, perhaps, of thorns.