How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions | Page 8

degrade even character. The morning exercises which are here recommended should be taken even as one washes his hands, as a matter of course. Man is spiritual, and character is developed spiritually, and mere attention to the body does not secure health and strength.
There is a great and easily demonstrated truth in the fact that people who believe in a spiritual life have endured untold hardships and have faced all kinds of conditions without injury. The power of mind over body, of spirit over matter, is too well attested to be doubted.
However, man is slow and progress must be made gradually. The first step must be taken before the last can be taken. Extravagant and wrong views prevent a great many people from doing anything.
If we examine all the rules for securing health and the leading secrets of long life, we find that one of the earliest is temperance.
A noted instance is Socrates. During the great plague, when at least one-third of the population of Athens died, Socrates went about with impunity. This was no doubt due to the cheerfulness and temperance of his life. We know of his cheerfulness from accounts by Zenophon and Plato.
Possibly the most illustrious example, which has been recounted of the preservation of health and the prolonging of life through temperance, is Luigi Cornaro, who was born in Venice in 1464. After having, according to Gamba, wasted his youth, his health was so broken and his habits so fixed that "upon passing the age of thirty-five he had nothing left to hope for but that he might end in death the suffering of a worn-out life."
This man, by resolution and temperance, battled with his perverted habits and became strong and vigorous and happy, and lived to be over one hundred years of age. "The good old man," said Graziani, "feeling that he drew near the end, did not look upon the great transit with fear, but as though he were about to pass from one house into another. He was seated in his little bed--he used a small and very narrow one--and, at its side, was his wife, Veronica, almost his equal in years. In a clear and sonorous voice he told me why he would be able to leave this life with a valiant soul.... Feeling a little later the failure of vital force, he exclaimed, 'Glad and full of hope will I go with you, my good God!' He then composed himself; and having closed his eyes, as though about to sleep, with a slight sigh, he left us forever."
A new edition of Cornaro's discourses on the temperate life, by William F. Butler of Milwaukee, has recently been issued under the title of "The Art of Living Long." The first of these discourses was written at the age of eighty-three, the second at eighty-six, the third at ninety-one, and the fourth at ninety-five. His treatises have been popular for all these centuries.
He held that the older a man grows the wiser he becomes and the more he knows; and if he will, by temperance and regularity of life and exercise, preserve his strength, his powers of enjoyment will grow, as his own did, every year until the end.
"Men are, as a rule," says Cornaro, "very sensual and intemperate, and wish to gratify their appetites and give themselves up to the commission of innumerable disorders. When, seeing that they cannot escape suffering the unavoidable consequences of such intemperance as often as they are guilty of it, they say--by way of excuse--that it is preferable to live ten years less and to enjoy life. They do not pause to consider what immense importance ten years more of life, and especially of healthy life, possess when we have reached mature age, the time, indeed, at which men appear to the best advantage in learning and virtue--two things which can never reach their perfection except with time. To mention nothing else at present, I shall only say that, in literature and in the sciences, the majority of the best and most celebrated works we possess were written when their authors had attained ripe age, and during these same ten latter years for which some men, in order that they may gratify their appetites, say they do not care."
We see not only in this passage but in many other places evidence of the fact that Cornaro lived a cheerful, contented life. The reform was evidently not merely in his eating and drinking but fully as much in the inner thought of his life. This is shown in many passages from his discourses.
He says: "Although reason should convince them that this is the case, yet these men refuse to admit it, and pursue their usual life of disorder as heretofore. Were they to act differently, abandoning their irregular habits