There is a mass of real superstition upon these points, a belief in a magic purity, in magic personalities who can say:—­

    My strength is as the strength of ten
    Because my heart is pure,

and wonderful clairvoyant innocents like the young man in Mr. Kipling’s “Finest Story in the World.”

There is a lurking disposition to believe, even among those who lead the normal type of life, that the abstinent and chastely celibate are exceptionally healthy, energetic, immune.  The wildest claims are made.  But indeed it is true for all who can see the facts of life simply and plainly, that man is an omnivorous, versatile, various creature and can draw his strength from a hundred varieties of nourishment.  He has physiological idiosyncrasies too that are indifferent to biological classifications and moral generalities.  It is not true that his absorbent vessels begin their task as children begin the guessing game, by asking, “Is it animal, vegetable or mineral?” He responds to stimulation and recuperates after the exhaustion of his response, and his being is singularly careless whether the stimulation comes as a drug or stimulant, or as anger or music or noble appeals.

Most people speak of drugs in the spirit of that admirable firm of soap-boilers which assures its customers that the soap they make “contains no chemicals.”  Drugs are supposed to be a mystic diabolical class of substance, remote from and contrasting in their nature with all other things.  So they banish a tonic from the house and stuff their children with manufactured cereals and chocolate creams.  The drunken helot of this system of absurdities is the Christian Scientist who denies healing only to those who have studied pathology, and declares that anything whatever put into a bottle and labelled with directions for its use by a doctor is thereby damnable and damned.  But indeed all drugs and all the things of life have their uses and dangers, and there is no wholesale truth to excuse us a particular wisdom and watchfulness in these matters.  Unless we except smoking as an unclean and needless artificiality, all these matters of eating and drinking and habit are matters of more or less.  It seems to me foolish to make anything that is stimulating and pleasurable into a habit, for that is slowly and surely to lose a stimulus and pleasure and create a need that it may become painful to check or control.  The moral rule of my standards is irregularity.  If I were a father confessor I should begin my catalogue of sins by asking:  “are you a man of regular life?” And I would charge my penitent to go away forthwith and commit some practicable saving irregularity; to fast or get drunk or climb a mountain or sup on pork and beans or give up smoking or spend a month with publicans and sinners.  Right conduct for the common unspecialized man lies delicately adjusted between defect and excess as a watch is adjusted and adjustable between fast and slow.  We none of us altogether and always keep the balance or are altogether safe from losing it.  We swing, balancing and adjusting, along our path.  Life is that, and abstinence is for the most part a mere evasion of life.