Most important of all, when parents know that the foundation of nervousness is laid in childhood, they will see to it that their children are started right on the road to health.  When fathers and mothers realize that an over-strong bond between parents and children is responsible for a large proportion of nervous troubles, most of them will make sure that such exaggeration is not allowed to develop.

And, finally, when parents are freed from their “conspiracy of silence” by a reverent attitude toward the whole of life, their very saneness will impart to their children a wholesome respect for the reproductive instinct.  There will then be found in the next generation fewer half-starved men and women carrying the burden of unnecessary repressions and the pain of unsatisfied yearnings.

Not that such a day will usher in the millennium.  We are not suggesting a panacea for all the social ills.  There is an inevitable conflict between the instinctive urge of the life-force and the demands of society, a conflict which makes men and women either finer or baser, according to the way they handle it.  What is claimed is that the right kind of education—­using the word in its largest, deepest sense—­will remove the most fruitful cause of nervousness by taking away the extra burden of misconception and making it easier for people to be “content with being moral."[47]

[Footnote 47:  Frink:  Morbid Fears and Compulsions.]

CHAPTER IX

In which we discover new stores of energy and learn the truth about fatigue

THAT TIRED FEELING

UNFAILING RESOURCES

“They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength.  They shall mount up with wings as eagles.  They shall run and not be weary.  They shall walk and not faint.”

It is safe to say that many a person loves this promise of the prophet Isaiah without taking it in anything like a literal sense.  The words are considered to be so figurative and so highly spiritualized that they seem scarcely to relate at all to this earthly life, much less to the possibilities of these physical bodies.

Besides the nervous folk who feel themselves so weary that they scarcely have strength to live, there are thousands upon thousands of men and women who are called normal but who have lost much of the joy of life because they feel their bodies inadequate to meet the demands of everyday living.

To such men and women the Biblical promise, “As thy day, so shall thy strength be,” comes now as the message of modern science.  Nature is not stingy.  She has not given the human race a meager inheritance.  She did not blunder when she made the human body, nor did she allow the spirit of man to develop a civilization to whose demand his body is not equal.  After its long process of development through the survival of the fittest, the human body,