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Updated: May 5, 2025
These, therefore, must be slain by these three exercises, God's governance, our self-mortification, the hurt done to us by others; and so they must spiritually rest before God, and give Him room for His works.
We do not doubt that children and young persons will one day be again systematically disciplined in self-mortification; that they will be taught, as in antiquity, to control their appetites, to brave dangers, and submit voluntarily to pain, as simple exercises in education. Something has been lost as well as gained by no longer giving to every citizen the training necessary for a soldier.
But they did not maintain that religious knowledge was the exclusive privilege of any caste: they were not householders but wanderers and celibates. Often they were ascetics and addicted to extreme forms of self-mortification. They did not study the Vedas or perform sacrifices, and their speculations were often revolutionary, and as a rule not theistic.
Tapas, that is asceticism or self-mortification, holds in the religious thought and practice of India as large a place as sacrifice. We hear of it as early, for it is mentioned in the Rig Veda , and it lasts longer, for it is a part of contemporary Hinduism just as much as prayer or worship.
When time had tempered her anguish, she saw with clear eyes that her acts had been guided by hallucination. Never would sorrow for her parents cease to abide with her, but sorrow cannot be the sustenance of a life through those years when the mind is strongest and the sensations most vivid. Had she by her self-mortification done aught to pleasure those dear ones who slept their last sleep?
It is almost with surprise that we find the result to be an organization which became one of the great forces of the world. The Buddha said that he taught a middle path equally distant from luxury and from self-mortification, but Europeans are apt to be struck by his condemnation of pleasure and to be repelled by a system which suppresses so many harmless activities.
After his mother's death Chrysostom enjoyed the seclusion of a monastic solitude for six years, but impairing his health by excessive self-mortification he returned to Antioch in 380. He rapidly rose to a position of commanding influence in the church.
The tendency toward self-sacrifice is an instinct, like all others, beautiful and useful when it remains in harmony with all our other instincts, and helps along in the common battle for Christ, who has given them to us. But this instinct can be perverted and run wild into asceticism and a passion for self-mortification, as hunger into gluttony and thirst into drunkenness.
"Nature is very unwilling to die, and to be pressed down, and to be overcome, and to be in subjection, and to bear the yoke readily; but Grace studieth self-mortification, resisteth sensuality, seeketh to be subdued, longeth to be conquered, and willeth not to use her own liberty.
Then they lacerated their shoulders with the hard leathern thongs of their scourges; and a faintness came over Flora Francatelli when she observed the blood appear on the back of the young and beautiful penitent who had given the signal for this self-mortification.
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