Yes, the Christian religion is an inspiring, health-giving activity. Jesus said: "I came that
ye might have life and have it more abundantly." Jesus denounced and attacked the dry
forms and dead rituals that passed for religion in His day. He was a rebel. He preached
a new kind of religion-a religion that threatened to upset the world. That is why He was
crucified. He preached that religion should exist for man- not man for religion; that the
Sabbath was made for man- not man for the Sabbath. He talked more about fear than
He did about sin. The wrong kind of fear is a sin-a sin against your health, a sin against
the richer, fuller, happier, courageous life that Jesus advocated. Emerson spoke of
himself as a "Professor of the Science of Joy". Jesus, too, was a teacher of "the Science
of Joy". He commanded His disciples to "rejoice and leap for joy".
Jesus declared that there were only two important things about religion: loving God with
all our heart, and our neighbour as ourselves. Any man who does that is religious,
regardless of whether he knows it. For example, my father-in-law, Henry Price, of Tulsa,
Oklahoma. He tries to live by the golden rule; and he is incapable of doing anything
mean, selfish, or dishonest. However, he doesn't attend church, and regards himself as
an agnostic. Nonsense! What makes a man a Christian? I'll let John Baillie answer that.
He was probably the most distinguished professor who ever taught theology at the
University of Edinburgh. He said: "What makes a man a Christian is neither his
intellectual acceptance of certain ideas, nor his conformity to a certain rule, but his
possession of a certain Spirit, and his participation in a certain Life."
If that makes a man a Christian, then Henry Price is a noble one.
William James-the father of modern psychology-wrote to his friend, Professor Thomas
Davidson, saying that as the years went by, he found himself "less and less able to get
along without God".
Earlier in this book I mentioned that when the judges tried to pick the best story on worry
sent in by my students, they had so much difficulty in choosing between two outstanding
stories that the prize money was split. Here is the second story that tied for first prize-the
unforgettable experience of a woman who had to find out the hard way that "she couldn't
get along without God".
I am calling this woman Mary Cushman, although that is not her actual name. She has
children and grandchildren who might be embarrassed to see her story in print, so I
agreed to disguise her identity. However, the woman herself is real- very real. A few
months ago, she sat in the armchair beside my desk and told me her story. Here is how
it goes:
"During the depression," she said, "my husband's average salary was eighteen dollars a
week. Many times we didn't have even that because he didn't get paid when he was ill-
and that was often. He had a series of minor accidents; he also had mumps, scarlet
fever, and repeated attacks of flu. We lost the little house that we had built with our own
hands. We owed fifty dollars at the grocery store-and had five children to feed. I took in
washing and ironing from the neighbours, and bought second-hand clothes from the
Salvation Army store and made them over for my children to wear. I made myself ill with
worry. One day the grocer to whom we owed fifty dollars accused my eleven-year-old
boy of stealing a couple of pencils.
My son wept as he told me about it. I knew he was honest and sensitive-and I knew that
he had been disgraced and humiliated in front of other people. That was the straw that
broke my back. I thought of all the misery we had endured; and I couldn't see any hope
for the future. I must have become temporarily insane with worry, for I shut off my
washing machine, took my little five-year-old daughter into the bedroom, and plugged up