“Whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of the hell of fire.”

by: John Bigelow, LL.D.

If I have been so fortunate as to carry any of my readers with me thus far, I hope they will be prepared to concede that any, even a partial, suspension of our consciousness weakens to a corresponding extent our bondage to the phenomenal or material world; and, on the other hand, that the man who allows himself to be too long and too much interested in any worldly subject or employ sooner or later is liable to unbalance his mind and become at first a crank, and ultimately a lunatic.

And this invited a consideration of some of the effects of the occasional interruptions of any current of thought or diversion of our mind from worldly interests that are becoming so absorbing as to threaten our spiritual freedom.

It rarely occurs to any of us to consider how numerous and providential these interruptions are, and how felicitously they supplement the divinely appointed offices of sleep.

How many of our household and family cares, how many of the exactions of children, of society, and of the countless interruptions which constitute the woof in the warp of every man’s life, and providentially thrust upon us like sleep, weakening the undue hold of the world upon our affections. We treat many of them as trifles; at more of them we murmur and often rudely complain, frequently not shrinking from suicide, never thinking that they not only may be, but are, messengers of mercy—supplementary Sabbaths of divine appointment.

It is a prevailing impression, entrenched behind numerous proverbs, that all our time during our waking hours not employed in the prosecution of what may be generically called business is wasted, that a man who is not working for some worldly purpose to some worldly end is an idle man, and that an idle man is a drone, of no use to society, and, if our race were as wise as the bee, we would expel him from it.

This, as a rule, is a great delusion. The man who “sits silent”—to use a phrase of the Society of Friends—may certainly have one great advantage of the busy man, for if not making the best possible use of his time, he is less likely to be the slave of this-worldliness than the busy man. His mind is more open and accessible to spiritual impressions, or, if you please, less liable to be preoccupied with worldly and selfish matters, than the more worldly man.

It strikes most of us as a very original and surprising conceit of Milton, though it ought to be with all of us the perfection of commonplace, that

“He also serves who only stands and waits.”

But how few there are in this driving age who really take any time to “wait,” to listen to the still, small voices, to reflect, to dream. Instead of thinking themselves, they get the people of the press, the forum, or the market-place, to think for them.

Nothing is spiritually more impoverishing for a man than to allow himself no time for dreaming; to feed habitually, if not exclusively, upon other people’s thoughts, and rarely or never upon his own. In that respect children ordinarily have the advantage of adults, the world not having yet reduced their imaginations to its stupefying bondage. In the languages of the greatest Roman satirists, in his quest of the means of living man forgets the end of life. He fancies himself the source and proprietor of the power he wields, and that the “kingdom, power, and glory” is not his Creator’s but his own.

Joseph was called by his brethren a dreamer. These brethren were no mean types of modern society, which is constantly laying violent hands upon our faculties for dreaming, for waiting, and for thinking. Of the sisters of Lazarus, the modern world sympathizes most with Martha, who was careful and troubled about her housekeeping; but it was not without a good reason that Jesus commended Mary.

We never know why it rains just as we are setting out on a picnic; why a child falls sick as we are about to embark on a journey; why the news of the death in the family prevents our going to a dinner or a ball on which we had set our heart; why the bank failed in which we had left our money. Still less do we know from what evils they may have shielded us. We should never forget that none of our disappointments are fortuitous, nor that one of the most obvious and constant advantages we derive from them is the same as that for which we are in a larger degree indebted to sleep.

Even sickness, the most familiar and universal deranger of the plans of men, is in most cases the result of too much this-worldliness, and also the most effective cure of it.

In taking leave of his pupils at the College of Charlemagne in 1841, in consequence of failing health, Jouffroy said: “Disease is certainly a grace with which God favors us—a sort of spiritual retreat which He provides us, that we may recognize ourselves, find ourselves, and restore to our sight the true view of things.”

One of the greatest problems with which psychologists have been puzzled has been to ascertain the moral condition of an insane person—that is, or a person who attaches undue and disproportionate value to privileges and distinctions of this world; whether it is, morally, a progressive, a passive, or a retrogressive state; and, if not progressive, how such a state is to be reconciled with that love of God which is supposed to be always operative over all his works.

When Jesus was told that his father and mother were without, waiting for Him, He replied: “Know ye not that I must be about my father’s business?” Jesus is always about his Father’s business; always knocking at every man’s door, trying to arrest his attention, and waiting for an invitation to come in and sup with him. He cannot be presumed ever to leave one of his children in a condition by night or by day when the process of their regeneration, which is the end and final purpose of their creation, cannot progress.

When we cease to be susceptible of spiritual growth in this world our life in it necessarily ceases.

God cannot be suspected of providing life and a terrestrial environment in this world for any except to educate them for a higher life. A contrary supposition must assume that the Omnipotent and the Omniscient could permit any waste of his energy. That is not supposable. Hence we are forced to the conclusion that if lunatics and idiots have reached their spiritual growth, and are capable of no more spiritual improvement, it is as idle to suppose that their Creator would continue to supply them with his breath of life as that He should continue to supply sap to a dead tree. No one’s days can be presumed to continue an hour longer than he possesses the ability to choose between good and evil and is capable of being fashioned into a less imperfect image of his Creator.

It is for that, and that only, we are put into this world; and there is no power willing and competent to keep us here a moment after that ability fails us. We are forced, therefore—at least, every Christian is forced—by a logical necessity to the conclusion that divine grace is just as operative with the wildest demoniac and the most helpless idiot as it ever was with the apostles Paul and John.

The most conspicuous feature of insanity is the more or less complete obscuration of the victim’s mental appreciation of one or more of the most familiar laws which govern the phenomenal world. He seems to live—a part of the time, at least—in quite a different world from that in which sane people about him are living. He even becomes to himself an entirely different person or object from what he appears to be to others.

Charles Lamb has told us that during the early part of his life he was constrained to retire to a lunatic asylum, where he was detained for several months. In a letter to his friend Coleridge, written a few years after his recovery, he said:

“At some future time I will assume you with an account, as full as my memory will permit, of the strange turn my frenzy took. I look back upon it at times with a gloomy kind of envy; for while it lasted I have many, many hours of pure happiness. Dream not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till you have gone mad.”

Is not a lunatic in much the same condition as a person dreaming, partially sensible of the phenomenal world and partially insensible of it? He will talk coherently for a time about some things, incoherently about others at times, but in a way that shows his mind is only partially alive to the relations of this world; so that what he says or does may be as inconsequential as what we ordinarily remember of a dream. Yet his mind is obviously quite as active when his talk is incoherent as when it is coherent. May he not be as sane as any other man appears to be in a dream? May not his attention be divided between the two worlds which, like the dreamer, he seems to inhabit? May not the society in which he finds himself at times when to others he seems insane as real as any other?—and may not agencies be at work constantly for his regeneration as for any other of God’s children?

Insanity has may causes, but the kind of insanity with which we are most familiar results from a disproportionate activity of some psychic qualities: ambition, avarice, vanity, an undue estimate of our importance in the regulation of the world, which, whether inherited or acquired, induce a disproportionate activity of certain emotions, which gradually, like all our appetites, grow by what they feed on, until they overmaster the reason and disqualify one for taking the precautions and avoiding the practices and habits for which they lust.

One of the first evidences of this loss of balance is usually insomnia. Most suicides are, directly or indirectly, attributable to the same cause. But where, I may be asked, are the evidences of divine love in such dispensations? That question may be most conveniently answered by asking another: What would be the consequences of allowing a person whose vanity or ambition, or other inordinate appetite, led him to the indulgence of such excesses for its gratification, if its progress were not arrested by the impairment of other faculties that go to make up the balance of a healthy character, but over which his reason, without being seriously impaired, had ceased to have control? He would evidently become by degrees a monster—such a monster as to be capable of any crime, and entirely inaccessible to any rectifying spiritual influences.

We are all of us more or less familiar with the perils we have providentially escaped through our disappointments and reverses of life. Are we not all in a certain sense like lunatics—victims of a more or less unbalanced mind? And is not the work of spiritual regeneration simply the effort, through divine aid, to restore that balance? And in the proportion that a lunatic is disqualified to take a sensible and rational interest in the phenomenal world, may he not to that extent be made accessible to regenerating influences of a similar character with those we have supposed to be operative during the suspension of our consciousness in sleep?

No one has ever ventured to sneer at Dryden’s remark that “Great wits are sure to madness near allied.” One can easily be persuaded by a reference to the biographies of men of genius that this poet’s words deserve to be taken quite seriously.

Lucretius, the greatest poet of ancient Italy, and Tasso, the greatest poet of modern Italy, both wrote the works to which they owe their fame with posterity during the interruptions of frequent attacks of lunacy. The former is said by St. Jerome to have died by his own hand at the comparatively early age of forty-four, leaving unfinished that greatest monument of Roman literary genius, the De Rerum Natura.

Tasso, like Socrates, believed he had a familiar spirit, or genius, that was pleased to talk with him, and from whom he learned things never before heard of.

• Caesar was an epileptic and subject to cerebral disorder.
• Charles V. was an epileptic; he took refuge from his throne in a monastery, where he had his own funeral rites celebrated in his presence—two of the many evidences he gave of an unbalanced mind. His mother was insane, and his grandfather, Ferdinand of Aragon, died, at the comparatively early age of sixty-two, in a state of profound melancholia.
• Linnaeus died in a state of senile dementia.
• Raphael had more or less of the suicidal mania.
• Pascal could not bear to see his father and mother together, though pleased to see either separately; neither could he see water without transports of vexation.
• Walter Scott, during the latter portion of his life, had visions betokening an unbalanced mind.
• Michael Angelo attempted to starve himself to death, and was only saved by the interference of his physician.
• Richelieu had attacks of insanity. His elder brother committed suicide, and his sister was also insane.
• Descartes imagined himself followed by an invisible person urging him to pursue his investigations in search of the Absolute.
• Goethe fancied he saw the image of himself coming to meet him.
• Cromwell had violent attacks of melancholia, and a sickly, neuropathic constitution from his birth.
• Jean Jacques Rousseau suffered all his life from an unbalanced mind, and not infrequently from attacks from acute delirium and maniacal excitation. He died from an apoplectic attack.
• Mohammed was epileptic, and claimed to be a messenger from God and to have had interviews with the Angel Gabriel.
• Moliere was a neuropath, and any delay or derangement of his plans would throw him into convulsions.
• Mozart was subject to fainting fits before and during the composition of his famous “Requiem.” He imagined messengers were sent to him to announce his end. He died at the early age of thirty-six of cerebral hydropsy.
• Cuvier is said to have died of a disease of nervous centres. He lost all his children by cerebral fever.
• Condillac was a somnambulist.
• Bossuet is known occasionally to have lost the faculty of speech, and even of understanding.
• Madame de Stael died in a delirium said to have lasted several months. She had a nervous habit of rolling between her fingers small strips of paper, an ample supply of which was kept on her mantel-piece. She had a nervous fear of being cold in the tomb, and desired to be enveloped in furs before burial.
• Swift from an early period of his life was odd, and “died at the top,” a violent maniac. He was called the “Mad Parson.”
• Shelley suffered from somnambulism, disturbing dreams, and an excitable and impetuous temperament, which increased with age. He was called “Mad Shelley.”
• Samuel Johnson was a hypochondriac, had hallucinations and convulsions, and was constantly apprehensive of insanity.
• Southey wrote verses before he was eight years of age, and died an imbecile.
• Cowper was attacked with melancholia at the age of twenty, from which he suffered for a year. It subsequently returned. He tells of attempts at suicide, and he would have hanged himself had not the rope broken from which he suspended himself.
• Keats was subject to fits of despondency, and was so nervous that the glitter of the sun or the sight of a flower made him tremble.
• Coleridge was a precocious child and had a morbid imagination. When thirty years of age he took the use of opium.
• Burns tells us that his constitution from the beginning “was blasted with a deep, incurable taint of melancholia which poisons my existence.”
• George Eliot was extremely sensitive to terror in the night, and remained “a quivering fear” throughout her whole life.
• De Quincey, in consequence of general nervous irritability, took opium to excess.
• Alfred de Musset had attacks which George Sand described as manifesting a nervous condition approaching delirium. He had a suicidal inclination. He had hallucinations which compelled him to ask his brother to assist him in distinguishing it from real things.
• Carlyle showed extreme irritability, and spoke of himself in his diary: “Nerves all inflamed and torn up, body and mind in a hag-ridden condion.”
• Bach and Handel were both very irritable, great sufferers from nervous troubles, and both died of apoplexy.
• Newton in his latter years was subject to a melancholia which deprived him of all power of thought. In a letter to Locke he says that he “passed some months without having a consistency of mind.”
• Alexander the Great had from infancy neurosis of the muscles of the neck, and died at the age of thirty-two, exhibiting all the symptoms of acute delirium tremens. Both his parents were dissolute, and his brother was an idiot.
• Lamartine was a crank, like his father before him.
• William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, was descended from a family exhibiting many peculiarities and mental disproportions approaching alienation.
• Pope was rickety and subject to hallucinations.
• Lord Byron was scrofulous, rachitic, imagined he was visited by a ghost, which he attributed to the over-excitability of his brain. Lord Dudley did not disguise his conviction that Byron was insane.
• Napoleon I. feared apoplexy and was subject to hallucinations.

There is no occasion to enlarge this list, as it might be indefinitely. In the instances we have selected there is sufficient evidence that insanity probably is, and certainly may be, a providential interruption of degenerating and pernicious tendencies. Even with our short sight, these tendencies may be traced to an unequal and disproportioned interest in some of our worldly affairs and the consequent enfeeblement of others intended to be regulating or compensating faculties. But it is blasphemous to suppose that the class of men so conspicuous for their usefulness in the world, to whose unbalanced minds attention has just been called, were not to the last, as much as ever, the objects of God’s uninterrupted and inexhaustible love and mercy.

There is really no more reason for supposing there is such an interruption in the case of lunatics than there is for a like supposition in the case of those whose consciousness is suspended by sleep. The impairment of some of their faculties may have been rendered necessary to prevent their confirmation in evils to which they may have been prone, just as all of us are more or less withheld in our slumbers, and thus made amenable to spiritual influences to which otherwise they would have been inaccessible.

Let it not be supposed that the changes here referred to are physical or the results of morbid cerebration, as was so flippantly taught not many years ago by many eminent French physicians; for we have abundant medical authority to the contrary. “Frequent autopsies,” says Chauvet, “reveal no appreciable difference between the brain of a lunatic and a man of unimpaired mental integrity. Such is the affirmation of all conscientious physicians who have made a special study of mental maladies.”

It is a medical aphorism as old at least as Hippocrates that a sufferer from a painful disease generally loses all consciousness of it on becoming deranged. A disorder of the mind replaces the disorder of the body. In illustration of this, De Bonnenhausen, on the authority of the chronicler Bulan, Hist. Secr. i. I2, quotes the following experience of the grandmother of Mirabeau:

“This femme bigote,” as he calls her, “eighty years of age and emaciated to a skeleton, was attacked, in consequence of a wrong treatment for the gout, with a furious nymphomania. From that moment she seemed to renew her youth; her monthly courses reappeared. This healthy period lasted for four years, but she rapidly sank and expired with the return of reason.”

Here is a case of a person experiencing for a series of years an extraordinary rejuvenescence of strength and respite from pain by being to a considerable extent cut off from ordinary relations and communication with the phenomenal world. She was bigote, says De Bonnenhausen. Was not Providence clearly dealing with this infirmity as it had once dealt with St. Paul’s, by cutting off her relations with an environment which had developed that mental disease, and reducing her to a condition which protected her from its influence, substituting a love for others, though on the natural plane, perhaps, of a morbid self-righteousness?

When Jesus and his disciples came down from the Mouth of Transfiguration there came a man who, kneeling down to Him, said, “Lord, have mercy on my son: for he is a lunatic and sore vexed: and oft-times he falleth into the fire, and oft into the water. And I brought him to thy disciples, and they could not cure him.” We are told that “Jesus rebuked the devil, and he departed out of him; and the child was cured from that very hour.”

While Jesus was in the borders of Tyre and Sidon, a Syrophoenician woman whose young daughter had an unclean spirit “besought him that he would cast forth the devil out of her daughter.” For the faith exhibited by this mother, He said: “Go they way; the devil is gone out of thy daughter. And when she was come to her house, she found the devil gone out and her daughter laid upon the bed.”

The man with an unclean spirit, who could not be bound even with a chain, and whom no man could tame, when he saw Jesus, ran and worshipped Him. Jesus bade the evil spirit come out him, and the demoniac was left clothed and in his right mind. He then begged to remain with Jesus, but Jesus made a missionary of him, as later he did of Paul of Tarsus.

Jesus may be seen by the feeble-minded today just as distinctly as when seen by this demoniac in Syria.

While we are permitted to assume that the insane and the idiotic, so far as they are detached from the phenomenal world, may be, to the same limited extent, in the condition of the sleeper and in a degree sharing the advantages which the condition of sleep is supposed to provide, it must not be inferred that any form or degree of insanity is in itself desirable, otherwise than as it tends to arrest spiritual tendencies of a more perilous character.

Insanity may be presumed to be in most cases the fruit of either deliberate or hereditary tendencies which conflict with divine order. The cases with which we are all of us most familiar are of persons who have become insane by overwork or by resorting to artificial means for superseding the demands of their constitution for sleep. As these excesses are commonly the results of inordinate ambition or vanity or greed, and when these spiritual infirmities reach a stage where any voluntary arrest of them is hopeless, a merciful Providence may be presumed so to modify their relations with the phenomenal world as to prevent further spiritual degeneration. In some cases the ministrations of Jesus warrant us in thinking that they work of regeneration is allowed to progress.

All that can be said with confidence of the influence of insanity is that in detaching its victim from habitual this-worldliness it so far resembles the operation of sleep, and is a real and usually an unappreciated evidence of divine mercy. A French investigator has reached the conclusion that the brains of military men give out most quickly; that out of every 100,000 men of the army or naval profession, 199 are hopeless lunatics. Of the liberal professions, artists are the first to succumb to the brain-strain. Is there nothing in the inspirations and aspirations of these pursuits to explain these results?

I do not think that I can with greater fitness close this chapter than by introducing here the words of one who professes to have had opportunities of knowing more of the ultimate destiny of these unfortunate classes than I or anyone else that I am aware of have ever enjoyed. Swedenborg, in a letter written to his friend Dr. Beyer, says:

“As there are no natural diseases among spirits in the spiritual world, neither are there any hospitals, but instead of them there are spiritual mad-houses, in some of which are those who have theoretically denied God, and in others such a shave practically done the same. They who in the world were idiots, at their arrival in the other world are also foolish and idiotic; but being divested of their externals, and their internals opened, as is the case with them all, they acquire an understanding agreeable to their former quality and life; for actual foolish and madnesses dwell in the external man and not in the internal spiritual.”

It is permitted to all to doubt this diagnosis of the condition of the lunatics and idiots, in the world of spirits, but it must be remembered that no one is competent to disprove it. To my reading, at least, it seems to confirm all that I have endeavored to say about the rationale and providential purpose of the disorders with which these demented classes are afflicted. It finds also much weightier confirmation in the following verses which I have taken from the 107th Psalm:

17. Fools, because of the way of their transgression, And because of their iniquities, are afflicted.

18. Their soul abhorreth all manner of meat, And they draw near unto the gates of death.

19. Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, And he savant them out of their distresses.

20. He sendeth his word, and healeth them, And delivereth them from their distructions.

About the Author

John Bigelow, LL.D.