Preaching and Preachers

Preaching andPreachersillustration from the realm of dietetics. This has always been the subjectof much discussion. What should one eat? What diet should onefollow?Thereare alwaysthose ready to come forward whohaveworkedout and advocate a kind of universal diet. Everybody should be on thisdiet, and ifyou go on to this diet you will never have any more trouble.There is one final answer to all that. I hold that the first rule of dieteticsis simply that 'Jack Spratt could eat no fat, his wife could eat nolean'. That is just sheer fact. Jack Spratt was so constituted that hecould not digest fat. He had not decided that; he was bom like that.This is a matter of the metabolic processes of the body which one doesnot determine. His wife was entirely different; she could not digestlean meat, but thrived on fat. Well now, to prescribe a common dietfor Jack Spratt and his wife is obviously just sheer nonsense.The same principle, I maintain, applies on a higher level also. Someof us are slow starters in the morning; others wake up fresh and brimfulof energy in the morning, like a dog at the leash, waiting to go towork. We do not determine this; it is something constitutional. Itdepends on many factors, partly, ifnot chiefly, on blood pressure andsuch matters as your nervous constitution, the balance of yourductless glands, etc. All these factors come in. I argue therefore thatour first business is to get to know ourselves, get to know how you,with your particular constitution, work. Get to know when you are atyour best and how to handle yourself. Having done so, do not allowanyone to impose mechanical rules upon you or to dictate to you howyou should work and divide up your day. Work out your own programme;you know when you can do your best work. Ifyou do not doso you will soon find that it is possible for you to sit at a desk-accordingto the rules and regulations-for a couple of hours with a bookopen in front of you, and tum its pages, but actually absorb practicallynothing. Perhaps later on in the day you could do much more in halfan hour than you have tried to do in the two hours in the morning.That is the kind of thing I mean.This means that this question of discipline is thrown right back onto the man himself. Nobody can tell him what to do. What controls168