Page:Readings in European History Vol 1.djvu/124

 88 Readings in European History Act similarly, so far as you are able, with all the operations of the senses, striving to make yourself free from their yokes. The radical remedy lies in the mortification of the four great natural passions, joy, hope, fear, and grief. You must seek to deprive these of every satisfaction and leave them, as it were, in darkness and the void. Let your soul, therefore, turn always : Not to what is most easy, but to what is hardest ; Not to what tastes best, but to what is most distasteful ; Not to what most pleases, but to what disgusts ; Not to matter of consolation, but to matter for desolation rather ; Not to rest, but to labor ; Not to despise the more, but the less ; Not to aspire to what is highest and most precious, but to what is lowest and most contemptible ; Not to will anything, but to will nothing ; Not to seek the best in everything, but to seek the worst, so that you may enter for the love of Christ into a complete destitution, a perfect poverty of spirit, and an absolute renunciation of everything in this world. Embrace these practices with all the energy of your soul and you will find in a short time great delights and unspeak- able consolations. Professor William James has set forth the various feelings which lie at the basis of asceticism in the fol- lowing remarkable passages : 34. A modem Where to seek the easy and the pleasant seems instinctive psycholo- _ anc j instinctive it appears to be in man ; any deliberate of theascetic tendency to pursue the hard and painful as such and for spirit. (From their own sakes might well strike one as purely abnormal. James, Nevertheless, in moderate degrees it is natural and even Varieties of * Religious usual to human nature to court the arduous. It is only the Experience.) ex treme manifestations of the tendency that can be regarded as a paradox. . . . Some men and women, indeed, there are who can live on smiles and the word " yes " forever.