Menu also wrote: " When one among all the Brahmin's organs fails, by that single failure his knowledge of God passes away, as water flows through one hole in a leathern bottle."

Veeshnoo Sarma prays: "O my friend [my body], support my reputation!"

IX.

"I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service."-EP. AD ROM. XII. 1.

All Philosophy anterior to Christianity tended to a belief in two principles, Evil and Good, represented by Matter and Spirit. The body became logically the source of all evil to man; it was called in all the old Sacred Books the prison in which it was confined, the net in which, like a bird, it was caught; therefore it was something to be sacrificed in the sense in which victims were.

This was well enough for Eastern devotees, whose mission was to dream and not to work. Where the summum bonum and the summum pulchrum clearly are to see visions and dream dreams, hand and foot are simply in the way. To an old Parsee basking in the supersolar sun for seventy years, the body is only an impertinent animal dogging his footsteps everywhere, insisting on its bone. The devotees are at peace in just so far as they can paralyze the clamorous senses. We call these mystics, from uvètic, a word which signifies a closing of the eyes: they can see, that is, better with their eyes shut. Of course, these people never achieved much besides Visions; Solomon's Temple, Nineveh, Bagdat, were fine dreams, mostly built from the quarries and mines of Fancy; New York could put them all in its pocket.

Observe, the body is thus a sacrifice to God. It is a victim upon the altar; it is consumed by fire from Heaven. It is, however, a dead sacrifice; the senses are offered up by being closed, the passions by being crushed; the members by being, disabled. But mark how Christianity introduces its new element! It speaks of the body's being offered as a LIVING SACRIFICE,-one not bound and dead on the Altar of the Soul, but full of life and vigor to be devoted to its service.

Just here where Sacrifice, an idea common to all religions, passes from the dead victim to the living body, lies the line between Heathenism and Christianity. In this sense our religion was indeed an incarnation. It was religion emerging from an Orient

dream into actual life in the physical institutions and achievements of man on the planet. Hitherto the Messiah was a prophesy; now he "was made flesh." Some have indeed thought of him as an old sacrifice, saving by his death; of course, a noble death has this power by reason of the life that is in it; but "if we are saved by his death, how much more by his life," says the Apostle. He came to dedicate the Human Temple to God; to sprinkle heart, brain, blood, nerve, hand, with the Holy Water of Life.

We owe a cock to Esculapius!

X..

So said the dying Socrates. Perhaps that is the only sentence worthy to close that holy history of the Phædo. Wisdom, Virtue, that unsurpassed Vision of the Future, summed up, were HEALTH.

We once heard an old physician in the northern part of Virginia say to a young minister of the Liberal faith, who intended missionary labors in that State, "You can preach up at Alexandria, and down as far as Occoquan, but it's no use trying to bring your liberal ideas down into the Neck: the people down here all have the liver-disease, they will be Calvinists."

We could not help thinking of the stern old Theologian whose name was thus used, and wondering if those Institutes, written for the most part in bed, part of which he himself labeled “horrible,' were not indeed a kind of eruption. O human heart, in the day when God enfolds thee as a Father, and Man is recognized as a brother, and Nature rejoices in the voice that pronounces her "very good," and Hope spreads her pinions about the World, then mayst thou draw near to that great man who in a spirit which transfigures the words, acknowledged his last and holiest debt to Esculapius; to him the god of Health and Healing Art, the child of the perfect-formed Apollo, whose symbol was the serpent, symbol also of Genius and of Eternity!

A learned medical friend has thus traced out for me this subtle connection between the thinking and sentient man and his disease: "Maladies are concentrated miasms, subversive aromas, corresponding with the mineral, vegetable and animal poisons in the lower grades of creation. They are, as it were, the disembodied souls of viruses. They correspond more or less completely to the graduated scale of vital endowments associated with the organs and faculties

"Decretum quidem horribile fateor.”—INS., Lib. III., c. 23.

of Man. Varioloid, for instance, when it invades a person, makes that person over in its own likeness, as to his skin and mucous membranes, so that its daguerreotype may be easily taken; moreover, in a less complete and more confused manner it fills and modifies the other organic spheres susceptible of entertaining it, such as the blood, which carries its ogre form into the brain, where it comes into intimate conversation with the nerve-vesicles, in the spheres of tactile sensation, of certain emotional and intellectual functions, and rises into consciousness by the corresponding ideas. The same miasm which in one country of the human organism is known as pain, is known in another as ugly thoughts, and in another as ugly pustules. I do not mean to say that Variola thinks or behaves like a human person when it is between two pieces of glass, or when it is diffused in the atmosphere; but I do say that, once in correlation with an individual organism, it instantly becomes human form itself, and polarizes with its own peculiar magnetism the thinking element, as well as the nutritive element of that person. Some organs or tissues remain unmodified by a given malady, which shows that that malady is susceptible of the human form only to a certain extent or partially. Some maladies localize themselves, and cultivate exclusively a certain organ or a limited segment of the body, on which they may develop parasitic growths. Such are the family of tumors. I think that maladies exercise a very extensive tyranny in psychologizing mankind, a tyranny at which mankind would do well to be indignant, and against which they ought to make systematic and religious war."

XI.

Man's foothold on his higher possibilities is more precarious than he is apt to imagine. Any excess which deranges a function does, as it were, trip him, and he falls back into pure animalism. Swedenborg writes of his first trance in London (1743), “I was hungry and ate with great appetite. Towards the end of the meal I remarked that a kind of mist spread before my eyes, and I saw the floor of my room covered with hideous reptiles, such as serpents, toads and the like." There is every reason why the inebriate presently gets far enough back to see the vermin and apes which, having escaped the tipsy Guardsman, riot within him. So hydrophobia will make a man bark at you. Health alone is the Orphic strain which leads these inferior orders captive.

XII.

It is very certain that there is not one perfectly healthy man on earth.

He who denies this may be the fat man, who boasts that he never had a day's sickness and weighs two hundred and fifty pounds. He has had, if he knew it, one spell; and when that will end it might be hard to say. His plethora is worse than emaciation; his nerve-spirit is shut up, Ginevra-like, in a trunk. There is a life near him to which he is dead; one-half of him is the sepulchre of the other.

Perfect health admits of no malformation. It must include the rounding out of the lobes of the brain, and a nervous action which can never be unsettled or controlled by the storms of passion. Is a man lustful you shall find there is too much blood in the back part of his head. Is he easily angered: cooling diet and wet cloths about his temples are good for that. Such men are sick. A healthy man could not do wrong, for he would seek happiness; and only a deformed or insane cerebral formation could induce a man to think that he could obtain happiness by violating the laws of his being, moral, intellectual, social or physical. Indeed, when Society itself is healthier, the only prisons will be hospitals and infirmaries. Drunkenness is reaching its just treatment; Prostitution will pass the crisis of the Magdalen Asylum and feel the probe of Positive Science.

XIII.

It is impossible to conceive what would be the result of having one perfectly healthy person on Earth. He would be felt to the centre of the Solar System. Not only would the human race, conscious of its hereditary diseases of ignorance and excess, cluster about him, but men would bring their lame institutions, their blind churches, their dumb superstitions, that he might transfuse into them his living blood. Invalids are warned to balmy skies, with light dews, pure airs and clear waters; but a healthy man would have pure airs and fountains and clear skies in his touch; for of such a man Nature must be the constituency.

To see this we have but to recall the health of some one function of a man, which has startled the world at any time. The perfect health of any faculty has always addressed the world as a miracle. The distance at which the Greek sailors saw the Minerva on the

Parthenon, from the sea; George Fox receiving, whilst preaching, a blow from an iron bar wielded by a giant blacksmith, and not having a bruise left; Swedenborg impressed at Gottenburg by the fire which was raging at Stockholm. three hundred miles distant,these and many other instances of fragmentary health which might be named, suggest our meaning. Each of these men, however, was unhealthy in other directions. But what would be the result had either of them possessed a physical and moral endurance, a will, an eloquence, a presence, an inventive power, a wealth, a control over animals and men, a manner, a humility,—each and all as perfectly developed and vigorous as that one specialty by which either of them made his mark, and became a part of phenomenal history?

XIV.

It is recorded that when, on one occasion, the Christ and his disciples were on a ship at sea, there arose a terrible storm, one that caused even those weather-beaten fishermen to quake with fear. But amid the tossing and lashings of the waves, the shrieks of the wind, the peals of the thunder, Jesus slept in unbroken slumber. When awakened by the trembling mariners, he showed no alarm, but by his calmness quieted their storm.

That profound slumber amid the roar of the elements tells of health, that calin awaking of nerves which knew no disease. It accords well with the fact that in all his life no day or hour of sickness is recorded. That sleep is the most eloquent of discourses. Could one fully accept the claim that Jesus was a man of perfect health, he would read the wondrous story in the New Testament with little marvel or skepticism, rather with belief and exultation that one had lived the normal life. It is not incredible that contact with a perfectly healthy person should send a thrill of health through the diseased. Health is also contagious. That which is alive can engender life.

Coordinate with that health which slumbered in the storm, which mastered diseases, was that moral health, Virtue, which in the darkest hour said, Now am I glorified." Only health could see an Idea to be as palpable and precious as life.

Here was one who lived in his body as in a palace; the Elements were willing vassals to him in whom they had distilled their finest essences but we, do we not live in our bodies as in huts ? Who of us is in such a relation with the world in which we exist, that