Work performed more for ultimate results than for the love of work and discovery of self, is not productive of poise, but rather its opposite-- tension--which ages, bringing hard arteries, cancer, apoplexy, paralysis, and premature death.

There is no evil so potentially bad as gossip for the reason that it is an antidote to poise. Tilden says, "there are people who ruin their lives by rolling off their tongue in foul gossip as sweet morsels." Gossip ruins the health of those who indulge in it, destroys the poise of the friends of those gossiped about and heavily handicaps the subject gossiped about. Gossips--male, female and neuter--age rapidly and develop organic "diseases," while keeping the mind always handicapped. Perhaps everyone has heard of the rattlesnake that made the fatal mistake of biting a gossip in the tongue--it killed the snake, not the gossip.

Religion is a psychic force that must be reckoned with. It may work good or ill. The emotional cyclone through which young (and old) people pass in the process of "conversion" in some of our churches, is enervating in the extreme, and is often enough to prostrate the functions of life. Many cases of illness and many deaths may be traced directly to these experiences.

Religious emotions, often used as a source of pleasurable thrills, are very destructive to the nervous system. In many cases they have terminated in nervous collapse and insanity. Any religion which leads to emotionalism, hysteria, trance, catalepsy, the "jerks," convulsions, and violent and purposeless activity is a mania. St. Paul admonished all Christians to exercise the "spirit of a sound mind."

Tilden says, "a healthy mind is a poised mind, and a poised mind is a spiritual mind." The unpoised mind is unsound. Inasmuch as we are still, and always will be, under the paternalistic care of the formative forces which blazed our way out of the past, there is certainly no occasion for fear of the future.

Many people, particularly women, have a very bad habit of allowing their emotions to run away with them. Indeed, they seem to derive a kind of false pleasure out of the sham emotions which they purposely work up. A sham emotion is an impulse or sensation which is cultivated for its own sake. It is not intended to be translated into action. Emotionalism is, indeed, a variety of intoxication, or, perhaps it is more correctly described as hysteria. Emotions or sensations should normally be translated into action. If they are cultivated for their own sake, with no purpose beyond this, they weaken and destroy both the mind and body. Intense emotions and sentimentalism work in much the same way as liquor and have very much the same evil results.

Immorality results in "disease" as follows: an evil thought causes a depressing reaction and this leads to enervation, with its sequence-- toxemia. Thought does not have to be translated into physical action to produce inharmonious reactions, and disintegration of structure (organic change) ; it is only necessary to harbor the thought or cultivate the desire.

Lying, stealing, gambling, and all forms of dishonor and dishonesty are enervating. Tilden observes that "dishonesty hardens the arteries and favors the development of cancer. Every act that shocks, builds disease by reducing energy." Before conscience becomes hardened there is the stinging lash of remorse and loss of self-respect. "When conscience is worn out, and the mind hardened to reckless indifference, then petty crimes give way to capital offenses."

The nervous tension associated with gambling, playing the stock-market, running a business that is not honest or that keeps one always dodging the law, maintains a state of nervous and mental tension that wastes nerve energy, disturbs secretion and checks elimination. Fear of discovery, a continuous dread of hearing the rattle of the bones of the skeleton in our mental closet, keeps us with a heart-disturbing throb that leads on to organic heart "disease."

"When we thrive," says Dr. Weger, "at the expense of another, or in a manner actually to harm another, thus breaking the law of the Golden Rule, there is a conscience reaction that eventually bodes ill to the transgressor, again according to the laws of action and reaction. 'Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all.' Those who live, so to speak, by their wits, whose sole business in life is sharp practice, running the entire scale of misdemeanor and crime up to bootlegging, burglary and worse, are by scheming thought and lawless deed, turning lose in the system a flood of poisons that never can be compatible with health."

The Bible tells us that "the wicked flee when no one pursues." Why? Fear--fear of one's own conscience, fear of discovery, fear of consequences. Fear is a most potent enervating influence.

Mental exertion uses nerve energy, just as physical exertion does. The present mad pursuit of wealth, the equally mad enjoyment of wealth, the rush for what passes for education, the educational cramming process, which seeks to accomplish the work of eight years in five, the open disregard of the laws of life through all these varied excitements and indulgences, are producing a harvest of suffering and premature death in this country.

The constant stretch of the mental powers, the restless excitement of the passions, the ceaseless excitement that characterizes the present over-stimulated age, play havoc with the nervous system, and, through this, the functions of the body.

The stress and strain of modern life is to surpass and outdo the other fellow--everywhere people overtax their intellectual faculties, until these falter and fail. Everywhere they overtax their emotions, until they actually stagger and collapse, or until the whole human machine snaps apart and breaks asunder.

One of our presidents died a few years ago. The excitement of. speech-making and meeting people, and as a post-climax, acute indigestion, had so completely enervated him that there was but one feeble reaction, and, as this was checked by stupid treatment, he passed away.

School is another builder of trouble. Children are confined and mentally taxed, either in studying their lessons or in studying how to avoid study. They are under more or less strain and anxiety. A. lot of influences that must come to the school girl or boy, soon lower resistance, and their improper eating provides more handicap than they had in the summer, when their bodies and minds were free. When advised to feed more carefully, parents usually show their ignorance by declaring that their children ate much more in the summer and it did not hurt them. The wise parent will know that an enervated child cannot digest food--any kind of food--as well as when in possession of full nerve energy.

Let us sum this all up in the following words of Dr. Weger: "Think of all the people you know and of all they do; all their peculiar ways of going on; all their cranky oddities which they must indulge ; all the things they take upon themselves: all their tempers and temperaments; all their hatreds, envies, and jealousies; all their fears, follies, and fanaticisms; all their vanities and superstitions; all their calumnies and revenges; all their licentiousness and lusts; then add to your thought one day's reading of the newspapers; then generalize, or universalize, and you will see what a mighty factor of unhappiness, misfortune, and disease you have to reckon with, and what the play of these factors upon the human body and its health is likely to amount to."

Worry, strain, suspense, anxiety, domestic discord, and many emotional excitants of a destructive nature, exhaust the nervous system and doctors who do not recognize irritability, loss of power to concentrate, muscle and nerve twitching, and a general feeling of unease, as danger signals, are likely to tell their patients that there is nothing wrong with them and attempt to console them by saying nerves never tire.

Self-control is the very core of mental and emotional hygiene and he who has not learned to control his emotions is permitting these to cut short his life. In this connection, by self-control is not meant the ability to hold one's tongue or fist when angry, or to keep from crying when sad. This is repression, not control. A suppressed emotion kills more quickly than one that is allowed to fly. The man who gives vent to his anger in cursing, or the woman who "cries it out," is relieved; she who represses her tears is a powder-keg of pent-up emotion that may explode or collapse, at any time.

By control, is meant poise; the kind of poise that does not get angry; the kind of poise that takes life philosophically, that maintains calm. "If there is one sign of sanity that is worth more than another," says Tilden, " it is that of poise. Well-balanced people reason well and maintain self-composure; their emotions are under their will, and such a disease of mind as fear is unknown." The ability to rise superior to and control the emotions is what we know as poise. If they control the individual, this constitutes lack of poise.

The poised individual is patient. He can calmly wait and is, therefore, master of the situation. Nothing so surely prevents loss of energy as submission, endurance, acquiescence, poise--in a word, patience. Patience supports the will, strengthens the mind, conserves energy and governs the flesh. The evils in the body, as in the world, are killed by enduring them. They grow if fed with frets and fears. Therefore, "let patience have her perfect work."