II

What is the remedy? "To get fat and take things more easily' is the usual advice of those who, though incomplete themselves, live comfortably and do good work. And there is common sense in that view, if it will work! Life, after all, often tends to swing the timid or disorganized spirit into pleasant or dangerous and stimulating situations, where his troubles cure themselves. A visit from a fascinating sister, or a play of Bernard Shaw's, even a timely household crisis, demanding unselfish action, may be of more use than much taking of pains. But, at the very last, the thing is not a joking matter; and great souls as well as little ones have suffered intensely, and often been paralyzed for their life's work, by that uncaused anguish which is harder to bear than grief. No one can read the story of mediæval saints (or of modern ones, like Tolstoi) without recognizing in their 'night of the soul,' their aridities, and their 'abandonments,' the counterpart of our modern melancholies. The long literature of mysticism is scattered with canny knowledge about bitter mental states, and the Devil's use of them to tempt us away from sane living; knowledge that would shame some of our alienists. And it was One, long ago, who said of a sick soul whom He was about to deliver, 'This kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting.'

Fasting is something we at present understand little. It certainly has its uses in producing mental states at once intense and simplified, and I cannot think Christ's fasting was accidental or unimportant. No generation interested in the discipline of the soul ought to ignore this subject. My own conclusions beyond this, however, are not worth offering.

As to prayer, it is the single greatest need of man; and though its neglect

may to all appearance go unpunished in many instances (think of our unselfish public characters in America-doctors, writers, and social workers who never to our knowledge use formal worship), yet this is not the case with sick souls.

'But how is prayer possible to anyone so tormented and darkened as I, and whose faith is after all so weak?' the sick soul cries out. The answer must be in terms, not of possibility, but of necessity. It is never possible to pray as we ought to pray. Our mere weakness of body, our more humiliating weakness of purpose, make almost all human prayers a travesty on that intense and extended communion with God which is the goal of our frail desires. But the wise doctor, to whom a sick soul says, 'I do not know how to pray,' will no more stop to argue that question than he would if a tired invalid said, 'I do not know how to eat well.'

'You do not know how, but you must,' he would retort to the dyspeptic; and to the sick soul he must answer, 'You do not know how to pray, but you can. You do not need any art or wisdom. You must simply turn to God. You say you do not know Him, but I say He knows you. There is no credible God except the God whom Jesus Christ proclaimed, who has counted every hair of your head and every tear from your eyes. All your pain is his pain. Offer it to Him, then. If for the moment you have no talent, no joy, no vision, no virtue, to offer your Father, offer Him your suffering and offer it completely. Cast away all reserves and all courage. Let your whole trouble be poured out, like water on the ground.'

Such advice, such a command, is, I hold, the physician's duty and the friend's privilege to give, whenever the spectacle of a spirit twisted with causeless pain is presented to them. Prayer is varied and infinite as the manifesta

tions of man's life on earth, and no formula for it, not even Christ's spoken words, can predetermine the shape and habit which any individual's prayer should assume. But if our diagnosis of the sick soul is correct, if such a nature is a spirit community in which the members know not each other, and where an alien spirit or trivial mood controls, unity can and must first be achieved in any sort of immediate and sincere confession to God. And in such a first abandonment, profound, instinctive, and helpless as a child's sobbing, there is healing beyond expression. The process demands no effort, hardly an intention, perhaps not even hope; for those who suffer above a certain degree do not live in the future: the moment's ordeal is all that consciousness can hold. The only duty, the only necessity, for spirits, if the demon of melancholy has brought them to that experience, is to share it absolutely, unreservedly with God.

But this confession must indeed be to God and not to man, and to God with no man hearing it, if a real cure is to be assured. And here at once is the physician's dilemma and his deliverance. He must in some way speak with authority as an accredited priest, demanding this supreme sacrifice of every inhibition and restraint. And he must also make himself of no account and take himself away, out of the mind of the sick spirit altogether. He must leave the sufferer alone with the Lord.

For both friends and doctors this is sometimes a difficult deed. We trust God so feebly. We tend, if our affections are once stirred, so to overestimate the value of those little talents apart from that Stern Husbandman who lent them to us. But the sick soul is a burden which no other soul on earth can bear alone. And the doctor or friend who believes that the sufferer has really gone from his presence into

the comfort of a divine interview, will know a rare and perfect happiness.

Moreover, there is still work for the ministering friend or medical expert. Conversion for the depressed soul in a single prayer is indeed possible. And in the habit of prayer that may at once be set up if the first attempt has reality, the invalid will soon learn to cure himself, and dismiss or exhort his helpers. Yet the later prayers will change their form. This immense burden of pain once delivered over to God, the Devil abolished, the quondam sick soul then asks orders for a new life. At the moment of extreme depression, he could not believe that the world offered him any further opportunity for usefulness.

And may I say here, that I do not think it wise always to try to pierce such depression with a description of the sources needed from the sick soul? The 'work-cure' type of treatment for neurasthenia will always fail, I think, in the deeper-seated cases of depression, because it tries to enlist the enthusiasm of a partial being. Three quarters of a soul may be stirred to get up and behave like a real person, and occasionally (here is the strength of the work-cure theory) does become one in action. If, however, there is a part of him forever unconvinced, waiting apart in chains of affliction and iron, that rebel will some day break loose and destroy the whole artificially ordered programme. But the soul that has once become whole in abandonment to God, that has been delivered from the control of its 'malicious minority,' its Devil, that soul can truly begin a new life. Such a nature may, indeed, because of its new reliance on its Creator, be capable of such labors, as before its 'fall' into despair it never dared dream of. And a doctor or friend may help during the stages of the soul's reeducation, not so much by practical advice or superior wisdom, as by a reinforcing faith in his chosen path.

When he looks back to them for guidance or comment, they can repeat, out of the fulness of this belief, 'Blessed be the name of the Lord.'

May I now be allowed to add to these rather loose remarks, some distinctly personal ones?

For my own case I have talked with four doctors. Each of them gave me kindness and sympathy. All except one took pains to assure me that my depression was not alarming, that I was not 'abnormal.' That assurance, by the way, reminds me of a friend of mine, a famous painter, one of whose pictures was lost on a railway journey. The picture was an important one. The United States government was interested in finding it, and a young government clerk, trying to soothe my irate and not at all plaintive friend, explained that the delay was not unusual. "There is really no need to worry.'-Silly boy,' the painter commented to me; 'he did n't understand at all. I don't in the least mind worrying so long as I get my picture.' And I might honestly have told the three kind doctors that I did n't a bit care whether I was normal or insane, if only it would please stop! The fourth doctor was agnostic on that point, but he minded my suffering too much to give me any comfort. I spoke ⚫ with him only a few times (once each with the others), because, though at first I got the impression that I could shift my pain to him, as soon as I saw any chance of success, I was dismayed: first, by the selfishness of that process,

and second, by its uselessness. For I wanted not to share the evil thing or shift it, but to have it taken out of the world.

Among the other doctors was one who was not an alienist but a surgeon. We talked for twenty minutes once when I had been seriously ill. I told him the trouble and said, 'Only religion will help.' He answered, 'That is perfectly true'; and nothing that any doctor said about the depression-very severe at that time ever helped me so much. He could have said more; but he was shy, and I had already chosen my own way. Nevertheless, I tell the story, unpicturesque as it is, and I am grateful to him.

This article has been written partly while I was suffering from extreme depression and partly while I was perfectly free from it. The faith I express stands firm in both stages. I have often believed that I had, with the Lord's help, conquered the demon melancholy forever. After six months or a year I have, so far, always learned that I was mistaken. At this moment, I cannot tell what the years have in store for me. But it is possible that just my uncertainty may be of use to those I address. For I am perfectly confident about the future not that this visitation of darkness, this machination of the Devil, is surely exorcised, but that, if it comes, the Lord will be ready to fight on my side, and that I am not afraid of the battle.

THE old gentleman and I often walk abroad in a rural district where there is a taciturn blacksmith. The old gentleman always maintains an illusion of a chat with this man. 'I'll be having a word with the smith,' he tells me, 'while you wait outside.'

I sit upon a fence near that open door where the tinkle and the clank of the smithy is audible, but never a word from the blacksmith or his guest. Presently out comes the old gentleman, very bland and entirely satisfied with his social adventure. There is nothing so uplifts him as a chat with a blacksmith. And this is because, long ago, when his name was Rubie, he being then about thirteen years of age, the old gentleman worked in a smithy.

This was in a village near Cromarty among the East Highlands of Scotland. It was a kind of three corners of a village full of important houses, and the smithy, at the time Rubie was at work there, was really most important. Everyone used to call upon the blacksmith. This is the origin doubtless of the old gentleman's sense that the least you can do for a smith, if you pass his way, is to call upon him.

The youth of Rubie's day, in making these calls in the village of three corners, invariably hung about and made itself handy, holding horses' feet for the shoeing, or taking a turn at the anvil. And this for the many pleasures of that delicious atmosphere there was in the

smithy of a deliberate and deft business going forward there, and the blooming and the fading of the flame and of the glowing metal. But Rubie, besides his share in these unparalleled pleasures, received a shilling a day for what he did. And this is what he did: he was salesman, and he took shoes off the horses' feet. He would take the horse's hoof upon his knee, declares the old gentleman, looking at us with eyes in which we seem to see how big was the horse with his hoof on the knee of little Rubie. And he would pry off the shoe. And there was a mate of Rubie's, little like himself, and about the same business of shoeing horses, on whom the horse, growing restless, planted his hoof, and the boy died. This tale, never told us but once, seems to emphasize the enormous size of the horses treated by little Rubie; seems to account for . the shadow of their size which is in the old gentleman's eyes when this phase of blacksmithing is dwelt upon. But in the main you feel, in his account of this epoch, the thrilling sense of the dusk of that interior, smitten with the erratic light from the forge and peopled with young visitors.

The shilling, of course, says the old gentleman, was given to his mother. Now there is nothing to us 'of course' in this monotony of deposit. We think, and we say so, that a shilling should have bought his way into other of the important houses in the three corners.

And in a second-hand way, he agrees, it did. There was the grocer's house - he would be sent there for bread and for fruit. Oranges from Spain were there at threepence, nuts were there from Brazil, Zante currants, and sticks of black sugar. 'Boys bought sticks of black sugar, you know, flattened with a seal at one end.' We don't know; we think it very thrilling, and are much disillusioned when we learn that black sugar stamped with a seal is just nothing but licorice. We think it not at all exotic, but the old gentleman thinks as Rubie thought of black sugar.

The grocer, we infer, was nothing much to remember. He was just a creature behind a counter, who took your pennies and gave you in return currants dried in southern suns. The butcher, too, was another featureless man from whom you bought meat twice a week. Fishwives, now, were more real, because you tormented them, for all your mother chid you. They were of another tribe, coming to the village from Cromarty with their creels strapped to their backs, and with a sailor's superstition that, if they were counted, one would be lost. With this dreadful fate hanging about them, they yet walked single file. They were always counted. And they had a fishwives' dialect especially fitted to this crisis. These tormented and violent creatures were important as a kind of foreign spectacle and a diversion not as fellow humans, certainly not as individuals.

The keeper of the public house was important as an individual. And his house, on the west side of the post road, was important. But Rubie was never, in the whole course of his life, under the roof of the public house, because at the most tender years this little lad became a teetotaler and this to the great disgust of the more conservative of his relatives, who could not abide a taste so fancy or a will so weak that it

must sign a pledge. Terrible proud it was, to be a teetotaler, a thing of the south entirely, brought up to the Highlands by the Big Beggar Man, as Thomas Guthrie was called in those parts. And Rubie was his victim. Under this taboo he missed all the fine talk of the men from the hills who would be visiting the public house for a dram. Yes, there would be fine talk in that house, which was a kind of exchange for the news of the countryside. The missing of it was a great loss, and is still to be regretted.

As for the publican himself, he could be seen in church the Free Kirk, that was at the other end of the village from the Established Kirk. Rubie, sucking a peppermint in the pew beside his mother, saw him every Sunday. He was the precentor. He had a wart on the top of his head. There is a high note in the tune of Dundee, and in other lofty tunes, which he could not reach and to which he pointed in the upper air, clearing his own throat and leaving the commoners to climb. Little Rubie saw the wart and the uplifted hand and heard the coincident cough, sitting by his dear, dear mother in the pew, on all the Sundays of his youth.

For nine months of the year he worked on the six week-days from six to six, and in the three winter months he went to school. We worm this out of him. Rubie kneeling under the bellies of horses in the smithy is much to the fore; he crowds little Rubie at school. And yet, now that you mention it, Rubie at school had adventures, too. There was a teacher, of course you would guess as much; and he was a 'stickit minister,' of course, and you would guess that, too. He wore a white cravat and a silk hat. The boys called him 'Ability.' He was not married. He taught forty or fifty children the three R's, and algebra, history, Latin, and geography-'all those things, you