3. The unreasoning child cries and weeps until it is given what its body craves. But as soon as it is given what its body needs, it quiets down and asks no more. Not so with adults, if they live the life of the flesh and not of the spirit. Such men never quiet down and always want something more.
4. To humor the flesh, to give it superfluous things, things in excess of its wants, is a grievous error, because a life of luxury lessens rather than increases the enjoyment derived from food, recreation, sleep, raiment and home. If you eat superfluous dainties, your stomach becomes deranged, and you lose the craving for food and cannot relish it. If you ride where you can walk, if you accustom yourself to soft beds, dainty, highly flavored foods, luxurious furnishings, if you learn to compel others to do for you what you can do yourself, you have no pleasure in resting after labor, in warmth after being chilled, you do not know sound sleep, and you weaken yourself, you diminish, instead of increasing, your measure of happiness, peace and freedom.
5. Men ought to learn from animals how to treat their body. As soon as the animal has what it needs for its body, it is at peace. But man is not satisfied with stilling his hunger, sheltering himself from the weather, warming him-
self; he invents all sorts of delicate foods and beverages, he builds palaces, prepares superfluous raiment, and all sorts of useless luxuries, and in the end lives worse instead of better.
III.
The Sin of Gluttony
1. If men ate only when hungry, and then only simple, clean, wholesome food, they would know no illness, and they could resist passions more easily.
2. The wise man says: Thank God because He has made all needful things easy, and all superfluous things difficult. This is particularly true of food. Food that man requires to be healthy and able to work is simple and cheap: bread, fruit, roots, water. All of this is found ewerywhere. It is only difficult to prepare all sorts of delicacies: for instance ice cream, etc.
All of these dainties are not only difficult to prepare, but are directly harmful. Therefore it is not for those healthy men who eat bread and water and porridge to envy the ailing rich with their cunningly prepared delicacies, but for rich men to envy the poor and to learn to eat as they do.
3. Few die from hunger. Many more die because they eat too daintily and do not labor.
4. Eat to live, do not live to eat.
5. "Only a pot of broth, but plenty of health." That's a good proverb. Go by it.
6. If it were not for greed not a bird would be snared in a fowler's net, and the fowler would catch no birds. The same snare is laid for men. The belly is a chain for the hands and the feet. The slave of the belly is always a slave. If you would be free, first of all shake oflF the dominion of the belly. Fight against it. Eat only to appease hunger, and not to derive pleasure from it.
7. What is more profitable: to spend four hours weekly on the making of bread, and to feed on it the rest of the week, or to spend twenty-one hours each week on the preparation of dainty and tasty foods. What is more precious: the seventeen hours gained or dainty food ?
IV.
The Sin of Eating Meat
1. The Greek philosopher Pythagoras ate no meat. When the historian Plutarch, the biographer of Pythagoras, was asked why Pythagoras had abstained from eating meat he replied that he did not wonder at Pythagoras abstaining from eating meat, but he did wonder that there were still people left who though they might feed on grains, herbs and fruit, persisted in capturing, butchering and eating living creatures.
2. In the oldest days philosophers taught the people not to eat the flesh of animals, but to feed on herbs; the people, however, paid no attention to the sages and persisted in eating meat. But in our times the number of people who consider it sinful to eat meat, and abstain from eating it, is rapidly increasing.
We are surprised to find people eating the flesh of slain humans, and to hear that there are still such cannibals left in Africa. The time will come when we shall wonder that men could slay animals for food.
3. For ten years the cow has fed thee and thy children, the sheep has warmed thee with its wool. What is their reward? To have their throats cut and to be devoured.
4. Thou shalt not kill—does not apply only to the killing of human beings, but also to the killing of any living creature. This commandment was inscribed in the hearts of men before it was graven on the tablets on Mount Sinai.
5. Compassion with animals is so closely associated with goodness of character that it may be confidently affirmed that whoever is cruel to animals cannot be a good man. Schopenhauer.
6. Do not lift your arm against your brother, nor shed the blood of any other creatures inhabiting the earth, whether they be men or domestic animals, beasts or birds of the air; in the depths of your soul a still voice forbids you to shed it, for the blood is the life, and you cannot recall life. Lamartine.
7. The happiness which man derives from feelings oi compassion and mercy towards animals will make up a hundredfold for the pleasure lost through abstinence fnxn the chase and from the use of the flesh of animals.
V.
The Sin of Drugging Oneself with Wine, Tobacco, Opium, etc.
1. In order to live right, man needs before all the exercise of his reason, and therefore he should value his reason most highly, yet men find pleasure in dulling their reason with tobacco, wine, whiskey, opium. Why? Because men desire to lead an evil life, and their reason, when it is not dulled, shows them the wickedness of their life.
2. If wine, tobacco and opium did not dull the reason, and thereby did not give free reign to evil desires, no one would drink bitter beverages or inhale fumes.
3. Why do different people have different habits, but the habits of smoking and drunkenness are the same in all men, р(юг or rich ? It is because the majority of men are discontented with their life, and seek the pleasures of the
flesh. But the flesh can never be satisfied, and men, both poor and rich, seek oblivion in smoking or drunkenness.
4. A man is proceeding at night with the aid of a lantern, and he is barely making headway, he strays and recovers the road. But suddenly he grows weary of it, blows out the lantern and strays at haphazard.
Is it not the same when man drugs himself with tobacco, wine or opium? It is difficult to determine your path in life, so as not to stray, and to find it again, if perchance you have wandered away from it. And yet people, to avoid the trouble of following the true path, extinguish the only light that they have, their reason, by smoking and drinking.
5. When a man overeats, he finds it hard to fight against laziness, when he imbibes intoxicating drinks, he finds it hard to be chaste.
6. Wine, opium and tobacco, are unnecessary to the life of man. Every one knows that wine, tobacco and opium are injurious to the body and to the soul. Yet the labor of millions of people is wasted to produce these poisons. Why do people do this ? Because having fallen into the sin of serving their flesh, and seeing that the flesh can never be satisfied, they have invented such substances as wine, tobacco and opium that stupefy them into forgetting that they lack the things they would have.
7. If a man has set his life upon carnal pleasures, and cannot attain all that he desires, he endeavores to delude himself: he wishes to place himself into the position of imagining that he has that which he craves for; he stupefies himself with tobacco, wine and opium.
8. Drinking or smoking has never inspired anyone to good deeds: labor, meditation, visiting the sick, prayer. But
the majority of wicked deeds are committed under the influence of drink.
Self-stupefaction through drugs is not in itself a crime, but it is a preparation for all sorts of crimes.
9. The trinity of curse: drunkenness, meat eating and smoking.
10. It is hard to imagine what a happy change would come into our lives, if men ceased to stupefy and poison themselves with whiskey, wine, tobacco and opium.
VI.
Serving the Flesh is Injurious to the Soul
1. If one man has much that is superfluous, many others lack necesaries.
2. It is better that the raiment befit the conscience than fit the body only.
3. In order to pamper the flesh, one must neglect his soul.
4. Of two men which is better off: he who nourishes himself with his own labor, merely to preserve himself from being hungry, clothes himself, merely to avoid being bare, houses himself merely to shelter himself from the rain and the cold, or he who through flunkeying, or what is more usual, through craftiness or force, obtains delicate foods, rich raiment and luxurious habitations?
5. It is inexpedient to accustom yourself to luxury, for the more things you need for your body, the more you will have to labor with your body, in order better to feed it, clothe it and house it. This is an error which only those men fail to perceive who by some fraud have arranged it so that others labor for them instead of laboring for themselves, so that in the case of the rich this is not merely inexpedient, but also a great wrong.
6. If we people had not invented luxurious dwellings, apparel and food, all those who are now in need could live without want, and those who are rich without fear for themselves or their riches.
7. Just as the first rule of wisdom is to know oneself, because only he who knows himself can also know others, so is the first rule of mercy to be content with little, because only he who is content with little can be merciful.
Ruskin.
8. To live for one's body only is to do like the servant who took his master's money, and instead of buying therewith things required for his own needs, as his master had commanded, wasted it upon the gratification of his foolish whims.
God gave us His spirit so that we may do the works of God and for our own good. But we waste this spirit upon the service of our body. Thus we both fail to do the works of God and injure our own self.
9. That it is inexpedient for man to indulge his lusts, but expedient always to fight against them, may be determined by any one by own experience, for the more a man indulges the demands of his body, the feebler become his spiritual forces. And vice versa. Great philosophers and saints have been always abstemious and chaste.
10. Just as the smoke expels the bees from the hive, gluttony and drunkenness drive away all the finest spiritual forces. Basil the Great.
11. What does it matter if the body suffer a little from serving the spirit? but woe if the most precious thing in man—his soul—suffer from the passions of the body.
12. Do not destroy your heart by excess of food and dnnk. Mohammed,
13. "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also," is said in the New Testament. If a man consider his body his treasure, he will employ all his powers to provide it with dainty foods, pleasant accommodations, fine apparel and all sorts of amusements. And the more strength a man expends upon the service of his body, the less he will have left for his spiritual life.
VII.
He Alone is Free» Who is Master of the Desires
of His Body
1. If a man live for his body, and not for his soul, he is like some bird that conceives the notion of walking from place to place on its feeble feet instead of freely flying wherever it pleased by using its wings. Socrates.
2. Dainty foods, rich apparel, luxuries of all sorts— this is what you call happiness. But I think that to desire nothing is the greatest happiness, and in order to approach this highest degree of happiness, you must train yourself to want little. Socrates.
3. The less you indulge the body in matters of food, clothing, housing and amusement, the freer will be your life. And on the contrary, no sooner you begin to try to improve your food, clothing, housing and amusement,—there is no longer a limit to your labors and cares.
4. It is better to be poor than rich, because the rich are more bound up in sin than the poor. And the sins of the rich are more perplexing and entangled, and it is difficult to make head or tail of them. The sins of the poor are simple, and it is easier to be rid of them.
5. No one has ever regretted to hav^ l\\^A. Vc^ -^-jLv^^
THE PATHWAY OF LIFE
6. The rich are so used to the sin of serving the body that they fail to see it as sin, and believing that what they do is for the best interest of their children, they train them from infancy in the ways of gluttony, luxury and sloth-fulness, in other words they corrupt them and store up great suffering for them.
7. What happens with the stomach when you overeat, occurs also in matters of amusement. The more men try to increase the pleasure of eating by inventing refined foods, the more is the stomach enfeebled and the pleasure of eating curtailed. The more men try to increase the pleasure of merrymaking by inventing elegant and subtle amusements the more surely they weaken their capacity for genuine enjoyment.
8. Only the body can suffer; the spirit knows no suffering. The feebler is the life of the spirit, the greater is the suffering. So if you would not suffer, live more in the spirit and less for your body.
SEXUAL LUSTS
SEXUAL LUSTS
In all people, men and women alike, dwells the Spirit of God. What a sin it is to look upon the temple of the Spirit of God as upon a means of gratification of desire. Every woman in relation to man should be first of all a sister, and every man to a woman a brother.
L
The Need of Striving After Absolute Chastity
1. It is well to live in honorable matrimony, but it is better never to marry. Few people can do this. But happy are they who can.
2. When people marry, if they can do without marrying, they act like a man who falls without having stumbled. If he stumbled and then fell, he could not help himself, but if he had not stumbled, why fall on purpose? If you can live chastely, without committing sin, it is better not to marry.
3. It is untrue that chastity is contrary to the nature of man. Chastity is possible and yields much more happiness than even a happy marriage.
4. Excess of food is ruinous to good life, but sexual excesses are still more ruinous to good living. And therefore, the less a man yields to the one and to the other, the better it is for his true spiritual life. But there is a great difference between the two. In giving up food altogether man destroys his life, but in abstaining from sexual gratification, man does not cut short his life, nor destroy his species which does not depend upon him alone.