"No, I am not doing that," said Father Payne, "but my theory is this. You
must know, first of all, what you are aiming at, and you must apply your
discipline sensibly to that. There are certain things in us which we know
to be sloppy--we lie in bed, we dawdle, we eat too much, we moon over our
work. All that is obviously no good, and all sensible people try to pull
themselves up. When you have found out what suits you, do it boldly; but
the man who admires discipline for its own sake is a sort of
hypochondriac--a medicine-drinker. I have a friend who says that if he
stays in a house, and sees a bottle of medicine in a cupboard, he is always
tempted to take a dose. 'Is it that you feel ill?' I once said to him.
'No,' he said; 'but I have an idea that it might do me good.' The
disciplinarian is like that: he is always putting a little strain upon
himself, cutting off this and that, trying new rules, heading himself off.
He has an uneasy feeling that if he likes anything, it is a sort of sign
that he should abstain from it: he mistrusts his impulses and instincts. He
thinks he is getting to talk too much, and so he practises holding his
tongue. The truth is that he is suspicious of life. He is like the
schoolmaster who says, 'Go and see what Jack is doing, and tell him not
to!' Of course I am taking an extreme case, but there is a tendency in that
direction in many people.
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