James Walsh - Religion And Health

Professor James confesses that unfortunately comparatively few educated people have the real power of prayer; those who have, however, possess a magnificent source of renewed energy that can be of the greatest possible service to them. He says:

"Relatively few medical men and scientific men, I fancy, can pray. Few can carry on any living commerce with 'God.' Yet many of us are well aware of how much freer and abler our lives would be, were such important forms of energizing not sealed up by the critical atmosphere in which we have been reared. There are in every one potential forms of activity that actually are shunted out from use. Part of the imperfect vitality under which we labor can thus be easily explained. One part of our mind dams up—even damns up!—the other parts."

Manifestly the well-known professor of psychology envied those who lived lives of prayer and felt that he was missing something in life from not possessing the developed faculty to enjoy their privileges. Like so many other of the good things of life, prayer, to be really efficient for all the good it can produce, must be a habit and must be practiced as a rule from very early years. Otherwise it is hard to make it such a factor in living as is significant for the best, and professional men commonly have not given enough time to the practice in their earlier years to make it of potency when it may be needed.

It is of course not long vocal prayers—though many people find not only consolation, but strength for their work and the added capacity to bear their trials in these—but the frequent raising up of the heart and mind to the Power above us, striving to put our intentions in line with His in the hope to do our work so that it will not be unworthy of the best aspirations that He has put in our hearts, that counts. Many of the saints have suggested that all our work should be a prayer begun with the right intention, pursued, no matter how difficult it may be, with the feeling that this is what we ought to do here and now, and finished with the offering of it to the Creator who has lent us the energy to accomplish it. Ora et Labora , pray and work, was the motto which Benedict, who revolutionized the social conditions of Europe by bringing back the dignity of labor and lifting men's minds out of the rut of the cult of their bodies, into which they had fallen at the close of the Roman Empire, gave to the members of his order. It was really not two things but one that he meant. What his sons accomplished as the result of his great motto we are only just beginning to recognize. They saved the old classics for us, kept the torch of education burning when barbarism might have quenched it, passed it on to the new generation, yet at the same time saved and developed agriculture so that, as President Goodell of the Massachusetts Agricultural College said, they made some of the best agricultural schools, in the best sense of that term, that have ever been made, and organized health and happiness for the country people as they have never been made possible before or since, except in the very modern time.

In the chapter on longevity there are some statistics which might very well and easily have been increased in numbers with regard to the effect of St. Benedict's foundation on the length of life that men have lived. Even now, in the midst of all our improvement in sanitation which has so lowered the death rate among mankind, we find that nearly fifteen hundred years after Benedict's work was first begun, his direction to make life a compend of work and prayer is having its effect in prolonging existence for the followers of his rule to-day. He himself would probably have said that it was the combination of these two that proved so effective in this important matter of lengthening life. We find that people outside the monasteries work enough, however, but fail to pray, so it would seem that prayer is a particularly important factor for monastic longevity, at least. Length of life comes, however, from a healthy mind in a healthy body, and nothing so conduces to the possession of a healthy mind as the habit of prayer, since it enables man to throw off to some extent at least—and the deeper the prayer habit the more it will do it—the solicitudes and anxieties with regard to the past and the present and the future which disturb so many people. As Ignatius Loyola, the wise founder of the Jesuits, said: "Pray as if everything depended on God; work as if everything depended on you; but leave everything to the Almighty, for you might as well since His Will will surely be accomplished anyhow."

It would be very easy to think that such habits of prayer in the midst of work would only be possible if the work that one was engaged at was not very interesting or was not taken very seriously and was being accomplished in more or less of a routine. In particular many scientific students, and especially those who are interested in psychology, would probably feel quite sure that very great results could not be accomplished in any important work if distractions of this kind were allowed and above all encouraged.

It is interesting then to take some of the examples of men who are known to have formed and maintained such habits and yet accomplished very great work for mankind. The list might be made a very long one; we shall mention only a few of the most distinguished. Almost in our own time Pasteur said, as we have already quoted: "The more I study nature the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator. I pray while I am engaged at work in the laboratory." A distinguished contemporary of his in France in his earlier years was Leverrier. There is no doubt at all about his power of concentration; he is the scientist who discovered the planet Neptune by mathematics alone without the aid of a telescope. He constantly kept a crucifix in his observatory and used to turn his eyes to it frequently for recollection and then go on with his calculations. There is a well-known picture of Vesalius, who so well deserves the title of Father of Modern Anatomy, at work in his anatomical rooms with a crucifix before him. The composition is founded on the tradition that the great anatomist was a devout man who prayed as he worked. He made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in his older years in expiation for a fault committed.

In spite of traditions to the contrary, a great many of our scientists of the last two centuries whose work has meant most for modern medicine have been men to whom prayer meant very much. There are traditions of Morgagni, the distinguished father of modern pathology, as Virchow hailed him, which show that never a day passed without his raising his heart in prayer. Volta and Galvani, whose names have become so familiar in modern electricity, were both of them well known for their devotion to the practice of daily religious duties. French scientists were not less devout. Laënnec, a Breton by birth, lost none of the devoutness of his early years so characteristic of the Bretons even when he was in the midst of the great work which enabled him to write the greatest medical book in modern times. Ozanam has told us that when he himself felt thoroughly discouraged and ready to think religion something that any one who wanted to keep up with modern thought would have to give up, he wandered into a church, hoping that prayer might help him to dispel his doubts and difficulties and found there praying before the altar devoutly his great professor of science, Ampère.

Deep thinkers, whether of scientific temper of mind or not, have recognized the value of prayer. Vesalius' great contemporary, Michelangelo, who is perhaps the greatest intellectual and artistic genius that the world has ever known—sculptor, architect, painter, poet, and unsurpassed in all these modes of human expression at their highest—was another for whom his crucifix meant much and who frequently turned to it. One of his greatest sonnets is dedicated to the Crucified One. Of Leonardo da Vinci's private life we we know less, but on his death bed he left a sum of money to be used to provide candles to burn before the altar of the little village church at which he had prayed as a boy, so that evidently something of that old fervor of spirit was his at the end. Leonardo da Vinci's mind was one of the most acute in the whole history of mankind. He was a great painter, sculptor, architect, and also a great engineer, a great scientific discoverer, an inventor of all sorts of useful appliances and a veritable marvel of comprehensive appreciation of the significance of even the most obscure things. He is a founder in half a dozen sciences, paleontology, biology, anatomy, physics and mechanics, and nothing makes one feel the smallness of the ordinary man like reading a sketch of Leonardo's achievements.