While reading a chapter on the Holy Spirit by Beecher, I ran across this paragraph. Needless to say with a center housing thirty men I found it fascinating and so relevant.

“We are so made that our first experience of excitement comes from physical or material excitements. Food, drink, heat, cold, agents of various kinds, on being applied to the body, or taken within it, develop nervous excitement. This nervous excitement goes on past mere sensational excitement, and becomes an excitement of the brain – of its passions, its reason and its affections. It is the lowest form of excitement. We very soon become familiar with the fact that men may be excited by other than mere physical stimuli. When men come to live with one another, they are excited. They are stimulated by each other’s presence. We may call it “mesmerism,” or “magnetism,” or whatever we choose; but one thing is certain, that men excite each other in a general way. We know that men are powerfully excited by the affections which they exercise, and by the evidences of reason, and by reasoning’s. In other words, while we begin life under the influence of mere physical stimulants, we soon rise to a point where excitements are social and moral. They are not physical stimulants applied to a physical body, but they are invisible moral influences which act as excitements and wake up the mind and affections.”

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