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PAGE. Introduction, 9

THE BIBLE OF NATURE; OR, THE PRINCIPLES OF SECULARISM.

INTRODUCTION.

From the dawn of authentic history to the second century of our chronological era the nations of antiquity were beguiled by the fancies of supernatural religions. For fifteen hundred years the noblest nations of the Middle Ages were tortured by the inanities of an antinatural religion. The time has come to found a Religion of Nature.

The principles of that religion are revealed in the monitions of our normal instincts, and have never been wholly effaced from the soul of man, but for long ages the consciousness of their purpose has been obscured by the mists of superstition and the systematic inculcation of baneful delusions. The first taste of alcohol revolts our normal instincts; nature protests against the incipience of a ruinous poison-vice; but the fables of the Bacchus priests for centuries encouraged that vice and deified the genius of intemperance. Vice itself blushed to mention the immoralities of the pagan gods whose temples invited the worship of the heavenly-minded. Altars were erected to a goddess of lust, to a god of wantonness, to a god of thieves.

That dynasty of scamp-gods was, at last, forced to abdicate, but only to yield their throne to a celestial Phalaris, a torture-god who cruelly punished the gratification of the most natural instincts, and foredoomed a vast plurality of his children to an eternity of horrid and hopeless torments. Every natural enjoyment was denounced as sinful. Every natural blessing was vilified as a curse in disguise. Mirth is the sunshine of the human mind, the loveliest impulse of life's truest children; yet the apostle of Antinaturalism promised his heaven to the gloomy world-despiser. "Blessed are they that mourn." "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily." "Be afflicted, and mourn and weep; let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to heaviness." "Woe unto you that laugh." "If any man come to me and hate not his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple."

The love of health is as natural as the dread of pain and decrepitude. The religion of Antinaturalism revoked the health laws of the Mosaic code, and denounced the care even for the preservation of life itself. "Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink, nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on." "Bodily exercise profiteth but little." "There is nothing from without a man that, entering him, can defile him."

The love of knowledge awakens with the dawn of reason; a normal child is naturally inquisitive; the wonders of the visible creation invite the study of every intelligent observer. The enemies of nature suppressed the manifestations of that instinct, and hoped to enter their paradise by the crawling trail of blind faith. "Blessed are they that do not see and yet believe." "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be damned." "He that believeth not is condemned already."

The love of freedom, the most universal of the protective instincts, was suppressed by the constant inculcation of passive resignation to the yoke of "the powers that be," of abject submission to oppression and injustice. "Resist not evil." "Of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again." "Whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain." "Submit yourselves to the powers that be."

The love of industry, the basis of social welfare, that manifests itself even in social insects, was denounced as unworthy of a true believer: "Take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? what shall we drink? or wherewithal shall we be clothed? For after all these things do the gentiles seek." "Take no thought of the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself." "Ask and it shall be given you," i.e., stop working and rely on miracles and prayer.

The hope for the peace of the grave, the last solace of the wretched and weary, was undermined by the dogmas of eternal hell, and the pre?rdained damnation of all earth-loving children of nature: "He that hateth not his own life cannot be my disciple." "The children of the kingdom shall be cast out into utter darkness, there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth." "They shall be cast into a furnace of fire, there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth." "They shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb." "And the smoke of their torment ascendeth forever and ever, and they have no rest day nor night."

For fifteen centuries the pilot of the church lured our forefathers to a whirlpool of mental and physical degeneration, till the storms of the Protestant revolt enabled them to break the spell of the fatal eddies, and, like a swimmer saving his naked life, mankind has struggled back to the rescuing rocks of our mother earth. Lured by the twinkle of reflected stars, we have plunged into the maelstrom of Antinaturalism, and after regaining the shore, by utmost efforts, it seems now time to estimate the expenses of the adventure.

The suppression of science has retarded the progress of mankind by a full thousand years. For a century or two the Mediterranean peninsulas still lingered in the evening twilight of pagan civilization, but with the confirmed rule of the church the gloom of utter darkness overspread the homes of her slaves, and the delusions of that dreadful night far exceeded the worst superstitions of pagan barbarism. "The cloud of universal ignorance," says Hallam, "was broken only by a few glimmering lights, who owe almost the whole of their distinction to the surrounding darkness. We cannot conceive of any state of society more adverse to the intellectual improvement of mankind than one which admitted no middle line between dissoluteness and fanatical mortifications. No original writer of any merit arose, and learning may be said to have languished in a region of twilight for the greater part of a thousand years. In 992 it was asserted that scarcely a single person was to be found, in Rome itself, who knew the first elements of letters. Not one priest of a thousand in Spain, about the age of Charlemagne, could address a common letter of salutation to another." In that midnight hour of unnatural superstitions every torch-bearer was persecuted as an enemy of the human race. Bruno, Campanella, Kepler, Vanini, Galilei, Copernicus, Descartes, and Spinoza had to force their way through a snapping and howling pack of monkish fanatics who beset the path of every reformer, and overcame the heroism of all but the stoutest champions of light and freedom. From the tenth to the end of the sixteenth century not less than 3,000,000 "heretics," i.e., scholars and free inquirers, had to expiate their love of truth in the flames of the stake.

The systematic suppression of freedom, in the very instincts of the human mind, turned Christian Europe into a universal slave-pen of bondage and tyranny; there were only captives and jailers, abject serfs and their inhuman masters. Freedom found a refuge only in the fastnesses of the mountains; in the wars against the pagan Saxons the last freemen of the plains were slain like wild beasts; a thousand of their brave leaders were beheaded on the market square of Quedlinburg, thousands were imprisoned in Christian convents, or dragged away to the bondage of feudal and ecclesiastic slave farms where they learned to envy the peace of the dead and the freedom of the lowest savages. "One sees certain dark, livid, naked, sunburnt, wild animals, male and female, scattered over the country and attached to the soil, which they root and turn over with indomitable perseverance. They have, as it were, an articulate voice; and when they rise to their feet they show a human face. They are, in fact, men; they creep at night into dens, where they live on black bread, water, and roots. They spare other men the labor of plowing, sowing, and harvesting, and, therefore, deserve some small share of the bread they have grown. Yet they were the fortunate peasants--those who had bread and work--and they were then the few" . "Feudalism," says Blanqui, "was a concentration of all scourges. The peasant, stripped of the inheritance of his fathers, became the property of ignorant, inexorable, indolent masters. He was obliged to travel fifty leagues with their carts whenever they required it; he labored for them three days in the week, and surrendered to them half the product of his earnings during the other three; without their consent, he could not change his residence or marry. And why, indeed, should he wish to marry, if he could scarcely save enough to maintain himself? The Abbot Alcuin had twenty thousand slaves called serfs, who were forever attached to the soil. This is the great cause of the rapid depopulation observed in the Middle Ages, and of the prodigious multitude of convents which sprang up on every side. It was doubtless a relief to such miserable men to find in the cloisters a retreat from oppression; but the human race never suffered a more cruel outrage; industry never received a wound better calculated to plunge the world again into the darkness of the rudest antiquity. It suffices to say that the prediction of the approaching end of the world, industriously spread by the rapacious monks at this time, was received without terror."

The joy-hating insanities of the unnatural creed blighted the lives of thousands, and trampled the flowers of earth even on the bleak soil of North Britain, where the children of nature need every hour of respite from cheerless toil. "All social pleasures," says Buckle, "all amusements and all the joyful instincts of the human heart, were denounced as sinful. The clergy looked on all comforts as sinful in themselves, merely because they were comforts. The great object of life was to be in a state of constant affliction. Whatever pleased the senses was to be suspected. It mattered not what a man liked; the mere fact of his liking it made it sinful. Whatever was natural was wrong."

The dogma of exclusive salvation by faith made forcible conversion appear an act of mercy, and stimulated those wars of aggression that have cost the lives of more than thirty millions of our fellow-men. In the Crusades alone five millions of victims were sacrificed on the altar of fanaticism; the extermination of the Moriscos reduced the population of Spain by seven millions; the man-hunts of the Spanish-American priests almost annihilated the native population of the West Indies and vast areas of Central and South America, once as well-settled as the most fertile regions of Southern Europe. The horrid butcheries in the land of the Albigenses, in the mountain homes of the Vaudois, and in the Spanish provinces of the Netherlands exterminated the inhabitants of whole cities and districts, and drenched the fields of earth with the blood of her noblest children.

The neglect of industry and the depreciation of secular pursuits proved the death-blow of rational agriculture. The garden-lands of the Old World became sand-wastes, the soil of the neglected fields was scorched by summer suns and torn by winter floods till three million square miles of once fruitful lands were turned into hopeless deserts. "The fairest and fruitfulest provinces of the Roman empire," says Professor Marsh--"precisely that portion of terrestrial surface, in short, which about the commencement of the Christian era was endowed with the greatest superiority of soil, climate, and position, which had been carried to the highest pitch of physical improvement--is now completely exhausted of its fertility. A territory larger than all Europe, the abundance of which sustained in bygone centuries a population scarcely inferior to that of the whole Christian world at the present day, has been entirely withdrawn from human use, or, at best, is thinly inhabited.... There are regions, where the operation of causes, set in action by man, has brought the face of the earth to a state of desolation almost as complete as that of the moon; and though within that brief space of time which we call the historical period, they are known to have been covered with luxuriant woods, verdant pastures, and fertile meadows, they are now too far deteriorated to be reclaimable by man, nor can they become again fitted for his use except through great geological changes or other agencies, over which we have no control.... Another era of equal improvidence would reduce this earth to such a condition of impoverished productiveness as to threaten the depravation, barbarism, and, perhaps, even the extinction of the human species" .

The experience of the Middle Ages has, indeed, been bought at a price which the world cannot afford to pay a second time. The sacrifices of fifteen centuries have failed to purchase the millennium of the Galilean Messiah, and the time has come to seek salvation by a different road.

The Religion of the Future will preach the Gospel of Redemption by reason, by science, and by conformity to the laws of our health-protecting instincts. Its teachings will reconcile instinct and precept, and make Nature the ally of education. Its mission will seek to achieve its triumphs, not by the suppression, but by the encouragement of free inquiry; it will dispense with the aid of pious frauds; its success will be a victory of truth, of freedom, and humanity; it will reconquer our earthly paradise, and teach us to renounce the Eden that has to be reached through the gates of death.

HEALTH.

A.--LESSONS OF INSTINCT.

Nature has guarded the health of her creatures by a marvelous system of protective intuitions. The sensitive membrane of the eye resents the intrusion of every foreign substance. An intuitive sense of discomfort announces every injurious extreme of temperature. To the unperverted taste of animals in a state of nature wholesome food is pleasant, injurious substances repulsive or insipid. Captain Kane found that only the rage of famine will tempt the foxes of the Arctic coastlands to touch spoiled meat. In times of scarcity the baboons of the Abyssinian mountains greedily hunt for edible roots, which an unerring faculty enables them to distinguish from the poisonous varieties. The naturalist Tschudi mentions a troop of half-tamed chamois forcing their way through a shingle roof, rather than pass a night in the stifling atmosphere of a goat stable.

Man in his primitive state had his full share of those protective instincts, which still manifest themselves in children and Nature-guided savages. It is a mistake to suppose that the lowest of those savages are naturally fond of ardent spirits. The travelers Park, Gerstaecker, Vambery, Kohl, De Tocqueville, and Brehm agree that the first step on the road to ruin is always taken in deference to the example of the admired superior race, if not in compliance with direct persuasion. The negroes of the Senegal highlands shuddered at the first taste of alcohol, but from a wish to conciliate the good will of their visitors hesitated to decline their invitations, which subsequently, indeed, became rather superfluous. The children of the wilderness unhesitatingly prefer the hardships of a winter camp to the atmospheric poisons of our tenement houses. Shamyl Ben Haddin, the Circassian war chief, whose iron constitution had endured the vicissitudes of thirty-four campaigns, pathetically protested against the pest air of his Russian prison cell, and warned his jailers that, unless his dormitory was changed, Heaven would hold them responsible for the guilt of his suicide. I have known country boys to step out into a shower of rain and sleet to escape from the contaminated atmosphere of a city workshop, and after a week's work in a spinning mill return to the penury of their mountain homes, rather than purchase dainties at the expense of their lungs.

The word frugality, in its original sense, referred literally to a diet of tree fruits, in distinction to carnivorous fare, and nine out of ten children still decidedly prefer ripe fruit and farinaceous dishes to the richest meats. They as certainly prefer easy, home-made clothes to the constraint of fashionable fripperies. The main tenets of our dress-reformers are anticipated in the sensible garments of many half-civilized nations. Boys, within reach of a free bathing river, can dispense with the advice of the hydropathic school. They delight in exercise; they laugh at the imaginary danger of fresh-air draughts, and the perils of barefoot rambles in wet and dry. They would cast their vote in favor of the outdoor pursuit of hundreds of occupations which custom, rather than necessity, now associates with the disadvantages of indoor confinement. The hygienic influence of arboreal vegetation has been recognized by the ablest pathologists of modern times; avenues of shade trees have been found to redeem the sanitary condition of many a grimy city, and the eminent hygienist, Schrodt, holds that, as a remedial institution, a shady park is worth a dozen drug stores. But all these lessons only confirm an often manifested, and too often suppressed, instinct of our young children: their passionate love of woodland sports, their love of tree shade, of greenwood camps, of forest life in all its forms. Those who hold that "nature" is but a synonym of "habit" should witness the rapture of city children at first sight of forest glades and shady meadow brooks, and compare it with the city dread of the Swiss peasant lad or the American backwoods boy, sickened by the fumes and the uproar of a large manufacturing town. A thousands years of vice and abnormal habits have not yet silenced the voice of the physical conscience that recalls our steps to the path of Nature, and will not permit us to transgress her laws unwarned.

B.--REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.

The reward of nature-abiding habits is not confined to the negative advantage of escaping the discomforts of disease. In the pursuit of countless competitive avocations the Art of Survival is a chief secret of success, but in this age of sanitary abuses our lives are mostly half-told tales. Our season ends before the trees of hope have time to ripen their fruit; before their day's work is done our toilers are overtaken by the shadows of approaching night. Sanitary reforms would undoubtedly lengthen our average term of life, and an increase of longevity alone would solve the most vexing riddles of existence: the apparent injustice of fate, the disproportion of merit and compensation, the aimlessness, the illusive promises and baffled hopes of life. For millions of our fellow-men an increase of health and longevity would suffice to make life decidedly worth living. Health lessens the temptations to many vices. Perfect health blesses its possessor with a spontaneous cheerfulness almost proof against the frowns of fortune and the cares of poverty. With a meal of barley cakes and milk, a straw couch, and scant clothing of homespun linen, a shepherd-boy in the highlands of the Austrian Alps may enjoy existence to a degree that exuberates in frolic and jubilant shouts, while all the resources of wealth cannot recall the sunshine which sickness has banished from the life of the dyspeptic glutton. If happiness could be computed by measure and weight, it would be found that her richest treasures are not stored in gilded walls, but in the homes of frugal thrift, of rustic vigor and nature-loving independence. The sweetness of health reflects itself in grace of form and deportment, and wins friends where the elegance of studied manners gains only admirers. Health is also a primary condition of that clearness of mind the absence of which can be only partially compensated by the light of learning. Health is the basis of mental as of bodily vigor; country-bred boys have again and again carried off the prizes of academical honors from the pupils of refined cities, and the foremost reformers of all ages and countries have been men of the people; low-born, but not the less well-born, sons of hardy rustics and mechanics, from Moses, Socrates, Epictetus, Jesus Ben Josef, and Mohammed, to Luther, Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and Abraham Lincoln.

C.--PERVERSION.

Habitual sin against the health-laws of Nature was originally chiefly a consequence of untoward circumstances. Slaves, paupers, immigrants to the inhospitable climes of the higher latitudes, were forced to adopt abnormal modes of life which, in the course of time, hardened into habits. Man, like all the varieties of his four-handed relatives, is a native of the tropics, and the diet of our earliest manlike ancestors was, in all probability, frugal: tree-fruits, berries, nuts, roots, and edible herbs and gums. But the first colonists of the winter lands were obliged to eke out an existence by eating the flesh of their fellow-creatures, and a carnivorous diet thus became the habitual and, in many countries, almost the exclusive diet of the nomadic inhabitants.

Alcohol is a product of fermentation, and the avarice of a cruel master may have forced his slaves to quench their thirst with fermented must or hydromel till habit begot a baneful second nature, and the at first reluctant victims of intoxication learned to prefer spoiled to fresh grape-juice. Sedentary occupations, however distasteful at first, are apt to engender a sluggish aversion to physical exercise, and even habitual confinement in a vitiated atmosphere may at last become a second nature, characterized by a morbid dread of fresh air. The slaves of the Roman landowners had to pass their nights in prison-like dungeons, and may have contracted the first germ of that mental disease known as the night-air superstition, the idea, namely, that after dark the vitiated atmosphere of a stifling dormitory is preferable to the balm of the cooling night wind.

In modern times an unprecedented concurrence of circumstances has stimulated a feverish haste in the pursuit of wealth, and thus indirectly led to the neglect of personal hygiene. The abolition of the public festivals by which the potentates of the pagan empires compensated their subjects for the loss of political freedom, the heartless egotism of our wealthy Pharisees, venal justice, and the dire bondage of city life all help to stimulate a headlong race toward the goal of the promised land of ease and independence--a goal reached only by a favored few compared with the multitudes who daily drop down wayworn and exhausted.

But the deadliest blow to the cause of health was struck by the anti-natural fanaticism of the Middle Ages, the world-hating infatuation of the maniacs who depreciated every secular blessing as a curse in disguise, and despised their own bodies as they despised nature, life, and earth. The disciples of the world-renouncing messiah actually welcomed disease as a sign of divine favor, they gloried in decrepitude and deformity, and promoted the work of degeneration with a persevering zeal never exceeded by the enlightened benefactors of the human race. For a period of fifteen hundred years the ecclesiastic history of Europe is the history of a systematic war against the interests of the human body; the "mortification of the flesh" was enjoined as a cardinal duty of a true believer; health-giving recreations were suppressed, while health-destroying vices were encouraged by the example of the clergy; domestic hygiene was utterly neglected, and the founders of some twenty-four different monastic orders vied in the invention of new penances and systematic outrages upon the health of the poor convent-slaves. Their diet was confined to the coarsest and often most loathsome food; they were subjected to weekly bleedings, to profitless hardships and deprivations; their sleep was broken night after night; fasting was carried to a length which often avenged itself in permanent insanity; and their only compensation for a daily repetition of health-destroying afflictions was the permission to indulge in spiritual vagaries and spirituous poisons: the same bigots who grudged their followers a night of unbroken rest or a mouthful of digestible food indulged them in quantities of alcoholic beverages that would have staggered the conscience of a modern beer-swiller.

The bodily health of a community was held so utterly below the attention of a Christian magistrate that every large city became a hotbed of contagious diseases; small-pox and scrofula became pandemic disorders; the pestilence of the Black Death ravaged Europe from end to end--nay, instead of trying to remove the cause of the evil, the wretched victims were advised to seek relief in prayer and self-torture, and a philosopher uttering a word of protest against such illusions would have risked to have his tongue torn out by the roots and his body consigned to the flames of the stake.

Mankind has never wholly recovered from that reign of insanity. Indifference to many of the plainest health-laws of nature is still the reproach of our so-called civilization. Our moralists rant about the golden streets of the New Jerusalem, but find no time to expurgate the slums of their own cities; our missionary societies spend millions to acquaint the natives of distant islands with the ceremony of baptism, but refuse to contribute a penny to the establishment of free public baths for the benefit of their poor neighbors, whose children are scourged or caged like wild beasts for trying to mitigate the martyrdom of the midsummer season by a bath in the waters of the next river. Temperance, indeed, is preached in the name of the miracle-monger who turned water into alcohol; but millions of toilers who seek to drown their misery in the Lethe of intoxication are deprived of every healthier pastime; the magistrates of our wealthy cities rage with penal ordinances against the abettors of public amusements on the day when nine-tenths of our laborers find their only leisure for recreation. Poor factory children who would spend the holidays in the paradise of the green hills are lured into the baited trap of a Sabbath-school and bribed to memorize the stale twaddle of Hebrew ghost-stories or the records of fictitious genealogies; but the offer to enlarge the educational sphere of our public schools by the introduction of a health primer would be scornfully rejected as an attempt to divert the attention of the pupils from more important topics.

D.--PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.

But the laws of Nature cannot be outraged with impunity, and the aid of supernatural agencies has never yet protected our ghost-mongers from the consequences of their sins against the monitions of their physical conscience. The neglect of cleanliness avenges itself in diseases which no prayer can avert; during the most filthful and prayerful period of the Middle Ages, seven out of ten city-dwellers were subject to scrofula of that especially malignant form that attacks the glands and the arteries as well as the skin. Medical nostrums and clerical hocus-pocus of the ordinary sort were, indeed, so notoriously unavailing against that virulent affection that thousands of sufferers took long journeys to try the efficacy of a king's touch, as recorded by the unanimous testimony of contemporary writers, as well as in the still current term of a sovereign remedy. A long foot-journey, with its opportunities for physical exercise, outdoor camps, and changes of diet, often really effected the desired result; but, on their return to their reeking hovels, the convalescents experienced a speedy relapse, and had either to repeat the wearisome journey or resign themselves to the "mysterious dispensation" of a Providence which obstinately refused to let miracles interfere with the normal operation of the physiological laws recorded in the protests of instinct. Stench, nausea, and sick-headaches might, indeed, have enforced those protests upon the attention of the sufferers; but the disciples of Antinaturalism had been taught to mistrust the promptings of their natural desires, and to accept discomforts as signs of divine favor, or, in extreme cases, to trust their abatement to the intercession of the saints, rather than to the profane interference of secular science.

The dungeon-life of the monastic maniacs, and the abject submission to the nuisance of atmospheric impurities, avenged themselves in the ravages of pulmonary consumption; the votaries of dungeon-smells were taught the value of fresh air by the tortures of an affliction from which only the removal of the cause could deliver a victim, and millions of orthodox citizens died scores of years before the attainment of a life-term which a seemingly inscrutable dispensation of Heaven grants to the unbelieving savages of the wilderness. The cheapest of all remedies, fresh air, surrounded them in immeasurable abundance, craving admission and offering them the aid which Nature grants even to the lowliest of her creatures, but a son of a miracle-working church had no concern with such things, and was enjoined to rely on the efficacy of mystic ceremonies: "If any man is sick among you, let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord." "And the prayer of faith shall cure the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up."

Thousands of the fatuous bigots who prayed for "meekness of spirit" continued to gorge themselves with the food of carnivorous animals, and thus inflamed their passions with the sanguinary, remorseless propensities of those brutes. Luigi Cornaro, the Italian reformer, assures us that it was no uncommon thing for a nobleman or prelate of his century to swallow fourteen pounds of strong meats at a single meal, and that, after invoking the blessing of Heaven upon such a repast, the devourer of meat-pies would rise with his paunch distended "like the hide of a drowned dog." The "Love of Enemies," "forgiveness and meekness," were on their lips; but those fourteen pounds of meat-pie worked out their normal result; and among the carnivorous saints of that age we accordingly find men whose fiendish inhumanity would have appalled the roughest legionary of pagan Rome. Caesar Borgia, the son of a highest ecclesiastic dignitary, a disciple of a priestly training-school, and himself a prince of the church, seems to have combined the stealthy cunning of a viper with the bloodthirst of a hyena. Four times he made and broke the most solemn treaties, in order to get an opportunity to invade the territory of an unprepared neighbor. His campaigns were conducted with a truculence denounced even by his own allies; with his own hand he poisoned fourteen of his boon companions, in order to possess himself of their property; twenty-three of his political and clerical rivals were removed by the dagger of hired assassins or executed upon the testimony of suborned perjurers. He tried to poison his brother-in-law, Prince Alphonso of Aragon, in order to facilitate his design of seducing his own sister; he made repeated, and at last partly successful, attempts to poison the brother of his mother and his own father, the pope.

The heartless neglect of sanitary provisions for the comfort of the poor avenges itself in epidemics that visit the abodes of wealth as well as the hovels of misery. A stall-fed preacher of our southern seaport towns may circulate a petition for the suppression of Sunday excursions, in order to prevent the recreation-needing toilers of his community from leaving town on St. Collection Day; he may advocate the arrest of bathing schoolboys, in order to suppress an undue love of physical enjoyments, or to gratify a female tithe-payer who seeks an opportunity of displaying her prudish virtue at the expense of the helpless; he may vote to suppress outdoor sports in the cool of the late evening, when the inhabitants of the tenement streets are trying to enjoy an hour of extra Sabbatarian recreation--a privilege to be reserved for the saints who can rest six days out of seven, and on the seventh harvest the fruits of other men's labor. But epidemics refuse to recognize such distinctions, and the vomit of yellow fever will force the most reverend monopolist to disgorge the proceeds of the tithes coined from the misery of consumptive factory children. Nor can wealth purchase immunity from the natural consequences of habitual vice. The dyspeptic glutton is a Tantalus who starves in the midst of abundance. The worn-out tradesman, whose restless toil in the mines of mammon has led to asthma or consumption, would vainly offer to barter half his gold for half a year of health. Thousands of families who deny themselves every recreation, who linger out the summer in the sweltering city, and toil and save "for the sake of our dear children," have received Nature's verdict on the wisdom of their course in the premature death of those children.

E.--REDEMPTION.

It has often been said that the physical regeneration of the human race could be achieved without the aid of a miracle, if its systematic pursuit were followed with half the zeal which our stock-breeders bestow upon the rearing of their cows and horses. A general observance of the most clearly recognized laws of health would, indeed, abundantly suffice for that purpose. There is, for instance, no doubt that the morbid tendency of our indoor modes of occupation could be counteracted by gymnastics, and the trustees of our education fund should build a gymnasium near every town school. As a condition of health, pure air is as essential as pure water and food, and no house-owner should be permitted to sow the seeds of deadly diseases by crowding his tenants into the back rooms of unaired and unairable slum-prisons. New cities should be projected on the plan of concentric rings of cottage suburbs , instead of successive strata of tenement flats.

In every large town all friends of humanity should unite for the enforcement of Sunday freedom, and spare no pains to brand the Sabbath bigots as enemies of the human race. We should found Sunday gardens, where our toil-worn fellow-citizens could enjoy their holidays with outdoor sports and outdoor dances, free museums, temperance drinks, healthy refreshments, collections of botanical and zo?logical curiosities. Country excursions on the only leisure day of the laboring classes should be as free as air and sunshine, and every civilized community should have a Recreation League for the promotion of that purpose.

In the second century of our chronological era the cities of the Roman empire vied in the establishment of free public baths. Antioch alone had fourteen of them; Alexandria not less than twelve, and Rome itself at least twenty, some of them of such magnificence and extent that their foundations have withstood the ravages of sixteen centuries. Many of those establishments were entirely free, and even the Thermae, or luxurious Warm Baths, of Caracalla admitted visitors for a gate-fee which all but the poorest could afford. Our boasted civilization will have to follow such examples before it can begin to deserve its name; and even the free circus games were preferable to the fanatical suppression of all popular sports which made the age of Puritanism the dreariest period of that dismal era known as the Reign of the Cross.

The preservation of health is at least not less important than the preservation of Hebrew mythology; and communities who force their children to sacrifice a large portion of their time to the study of Asiatic miracle legends might well permit them to devote an occasional hour or two to the study of modern physiology. We should have health primers and teachers of hygiene, and the most primitive district school should find time for a few weekly lessons in the rudiments of sanitary science, such as the importance of ventilation, the best modes of exercise, the proper quality and quantity of our daily food, the significance of the stimulant habit, the use and abuse of dress, etc.

Such text-books would prepare the way for health lectures, for health legislation and the reform of municipal hygiene. The untruth that "a man can not be defiled by things entering him from without" has been thoroughly exploded by the lessons of science, and should no longer excuse the neglect of that frugality which in the times of the pagan republics formed the best safeguard of national vigor. Milk, bread, and fruit, instead of greasy viands, alcohol, and narcotic drinks, would soon modify the mortality statistics of our large cities, and we should not hesitate to recognize the truth that the remarkable longevity of the Jews and Mohammedans has a great deal to do with their dread of impure food.

STRENGTH.

A.--LESSONS OF INSTINCT.

Bodily vigor is the basis of mental and physical health. Strength is power, and the instinctive love of invigorating exercise manifests itself in the young of all but the lowest brutes. The bigot who undermines the health of his children by stinting their outdoor sport as "worldly vanity," and "exercise that profiteth but little," is shamed by animals who lead their young in races and trials of strength. Thus the female fox will train her cubs; the doe will race and romp with her fawn, the mare with her colt. Monkeys can be seen running up and down a tree and leaping from branch to branch, without any conceivable purpose but the enjoyment of the exercise itself; dogs run races, young lions wrestle and paw each other in a playful trial of prowess; even birds can be seen sporting in the air, and dolphins on the play-fields of the ocean. In nearly all classes of the vertebrate animals the rivalry of the males is decided by a trial of strength, and the female unhesitatingly accepts the victor as the fittest representative of his species.

Normal children are passionately fond of athletic sports. In western Yucatan I saw Indian girls climb trees with the agility of a spider-monkey, and laughingly pelt each other with the fruits of the Adansonia fig. The children of the South-sea Islanders vie in aquatic gymnastics. Spartan girls joined in the foot-races of their brothers, and by the laws of Lycurgus were not permitted to marry till they had attained a prescribed degree of proficiency in a number of athletic exercises. Race-running and wrestling were the favorite pastimes of young Romans in the undegenerate age of the republic; and, in spite of all restraints, similar propensities still manifest themselves in our school-boys. They pass the intervals of their study-hours in competitive athletics, rather than in listless inactivity, and brave frosts and snowstorms to get the benefit of outdoor exercise even in midwinter. They love health-giving sports for their own sake, as if instinctively aware that bodily strength will further every victory in the arena of life.

The enthusiasm that gathered about the heroic games of Olympia made those festivals the brightest days in the springtime of the human race. The million-voiced cheers that hailed the victor of the pentathlon have never been heard again on earth since the manliest and noblest of all recreations were suppressed by order of a crowned bigot. The rapture of competitive athletics is a bond which can obliterate the rancor of all baser rivalries, and still unites hostile tribes in the arena of pure manhood: as in Algiers, where the Bedouins joined in the gymnastic prize-games of their French foemen: the same foemen whose banquets they would have refused to share even at the bidding of starvation. In Buda-Pesth I once witnessed a performance of the German athlete Weitzel, and still remember the irrepressible enthusiasm of two broad-shouldered Turks who crowded to the edge of the platform, and, with waving kerchiefs, joined in the cheers of the uncircumcised spectators.

B.--REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.

The "survival of the fittest" means, in many important respects, the survival of the strongest. In a state of nature weakly animals yield to their stronger rivals; the stoutest lion, the swiftest tiger, has a superior chance of obtaining prey; the stouter bulls of the herd defy the attack of the wolves who overcome the resistance of the weaker individuals; the fleetest deer has the best chance to escape the pursuit of the hunter.

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