Who has not experienced with Mr. Emerson the difficulty of making the stomach a gentleman? Yet we think it the duty of a gentleman to turn up our noses at the priesthood of the Cuisine, and to hide on the remotest shelf of our libraries the Almanach des Gourmands along with The Art of Tying the Cravat. In a higher civilization the Régles de Gastronomie Transcendante will stand on the shelf uniform with Holy Living and Dying. We shall hear sermons preached from such texts as these from Barba: "La sobriété est la conscience des estomacs.

"L'homme est un sublime alambic. Les sensations, les acts, les passions, l'imagination, tout enfin, dans l'admirable appereil que l'on nomme corps, concourt à un but unique, la digestion."

"I lack words," says Brillat Savarin, "to express my contempt for a man who would be so discourteous to his stomach as to eat or drink too much, or who would commit an indigestion." Commit an indigestion! The sentence is Socratic.

Beauty rides on a lion.

IV.

No foliation of shaft or arch can make them beautiful unless they are strong enough to support what they are set to support. Venus must rest upon the lion of health, and can not substitute pallor and the hectic fire for the lily and the rose.

This parable reminds us that our popular Christianity has not fulfilled the law of the higher formation. It must everywhere sum up all the preceding formations, and lose none of their contributions, as the animal generations are summed up in the forehead of man. Jesus meant that his religion should do this: "This is the Father's will concerning me, that of all which He hath given I should lose nothing, but should raise it up." Is our One God sufficient unless He contain the Pantheon of the Past? What is there in the Church to-day to repay the loss of Hercules, of Apollo, of Venus? We need as much as ever forms herculean and fair. Still should we worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness (wholeness). The great Christian Ideas need great Christian sinews and transfigurable forms.

me

V.

Why should we cover up the moral evils of Invalidism, even when we feel most tenderly toward its individual subjects? We all know that one who is sickly is a destroyer of innumerable and

precious moments, talents and energies. What fair lives and strong capacities have had to abandon their sacred tasks, and turn aside from the sun-path of success, to waste away beside a sick couch! It matters not that it is a burthen willingly or joyfully undertaken by affectionate hearts; it is all the worse that such heroism and patience are divorced from the living interests of life. It makes but little difference if the sickness is borne with the most patient spirit. The fatal fact remains, that the God-given moments of many lives are falling away, sand by sand,- sands, and nothing more. Everything is, by the human Law, postponed to sickness : Life is eagerly bound to the chariot-wheels of Death.

We honor the sacrifice; for Mercy's call should be heard above all others; but this is a bloody sacrifice, only a type of the Living Sacrifice. If we are saved by this death of our lives, how much rather by their life!

Is this a heartless view? It is worth being esteemed heartless to come into a right and true understanding with the Destroying Angel of Homes. It is painful to have invalids told that they are afflicting as they are afflicted: probes and lancets are also painful.

VI.

"But how can we help being sick? Did we make the ills that flesh is heir to? What defence is against inheritance? Suppose it is ignorance of the laws of health are we responsible for such ignorance?"

It is true that tendencies to disease are inherited by some; also that circumstances may not have allowed many to know the laws of prevention and remedy; the epidemics, too, lurk as highwaymen on our paths. Therefore in estimating the morale of health, a certain extent of absolution must be allowed. There is not one healthy person on the face of the earth: therefore we are all responsible only for the health of diseased persons. Suppose a person to inherit a tendency to consumption, so that it is likely that the constitution will not last over thirty years: then thirty well-preserved and used years would be the health of that person; twenty-five or twenty would be immoral,- that is, would be the result of thin shoes, exposure, or some other violation of the protective laws which environ us.

In speaking of moral and immoral in this connection, it must be remembered that we mean, simply, to show that the body par

takes of the spiritual consciousness; it is the shadow of the idea organized in it, which we term Soul, and as a shadow represents the deformities and beauties of the substance casting it. A man can not be better or wiser than what his faculties are equal to: so he can not be healthier than his organization allows. But Nature loves health better than disease, and gladly coöperates with any brave attempt to starve out a baleful inheritance. Your footsteps are dogged by some beast of transmission; but are you not throwing it now a bone, now a loaf, in some evil habit, or thoughtless adventure? How much of the evil would be, in a generation or two, at least, sloughed off, if it were solemnly taught in the household that late hours are as bad as profanity; that self-neglect or indulgence, exposure, over-eating and drinking are equally wicked with falsehood and slander! How much would be gained if the waste of life, both to the unhealthy and others around them, could be so represented that a certain stigma and meanness should attach to invalidism!

VII.

Old Mrs. Influenza Crammit was kept sick twenty years, and every other year brought to death's door by a fault in her Hermeneutics.

You shall judge. This lady lived in her body as in a cheap summer-house, and one sadly in want of repair, too: it was in a ricketty condition, and would barely have served for a month or two of the year. She lived (?) in it, however, the year round, though the rain came in here and the snow there. The result was, Mrs. C. had a perpetual cold. One day I found the invalid with rations for a regiment before her, and complaining that she had not the appetite to dispose of it.

"Good heavens, Madame," I cried, "why should you wish to dispose of that food in your present state?"

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But, then, I have a dreadful cold!”

Alas, are you then become so desperate, my poor friend? Is there no relief but suicide?"

'Suicide!" screamed she; "who said anything about sui

cide?"

"Did you not say you were devouring this mass of food because you had a dreadful cold?"

To be sure the rule is (isn't it?), Feed a cold and starve a fever."

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Madame, your Hermeneutics are in a most dangerous condi

tion."

"My which? - my how?"

"Your Rules of Interpretation. The Proverb is, Feed a cold and you'll have to starve a fever;' that is, Feed your cold and you raise a fiend from the nethermost Fire, and lucky indeed will you be if you can starve him off your track.”

"Lord bless me!" cried Mrs. Crammit, "and here I've been stuffing for this cold twenty years!"

[To be concluded.]

PSYCHOLOGY OF OPIUM AND HASHEESH.

HASHEESH.

IN the sap of Cannabis Indica is found a peculiar resinous substance which is the most powerful of known narcotics, so powerful that in even northern countries, where the proportion of resin in the plant is so small that it had well nigh escaped observation, one can not long remain in a hemp-field without experiencing that sickening giddiness which leads on to catalepsy as surely as the Mississippi to the sea.

The narcotic effects of this plant, which is hasheesh, are similar in many respects to those of opium, but they differ from them very widely in others, the most notable of which is this: while opium lessens the sensibility to external impressions, and creates an inhuman love of solitude, hasheesh immeasurably increases the susceptibility of the senses, so much so that its devotee is made the creature and very slave of impressions from without. All the objects of sensation are endowed with supernatural attributes and proportions. A straw put in the path of one possessed by the fantasia presents an insurmountable obstacle, and the slightest dangers overpower the mind with cowardice. Even the slight noises which one hears at night, occasioned by changes of temperature, in the timbers of the house, are liable to throw the hasheeshin into horrible convulsions of fear. Time and space are magnified into frightful proportions. Minutes become æons, eternitiesone may writhe in Gehenna for ages, or, confined beneath the foundations of the world, hear the solemn tramp of a thousand

centuries, and waking, find the second-hand has not travelled once round the dial. The walls of a college dormitory burst asunder, and station themselves at sublime distances, and dome erects itself on dome, until the eye shrinks blinded by infinity. Even the body itself is not exempt from this wonderful expansion. Bayard Taylor, when under the influence of hasheesh, felt that he existed through a vast extent of space. "The blood," he says, "pulsed from my heart, sped through uncounted leagues before it reached my extremities; the air drawn into my lungs expanded into a sea of limpid ether, and the arch of my skull was broader than the vault of heaven. Within the concave that held my brain were fathomless deeps of blue; clouds floated there, and the winds of heaven rolled them together, and there shone the sun." Then, too, all the operations of the vital organism often become the objects of introverted observation, and all the secret and mysterious economy of animal life is revealed: the blood is followed by an uneludible eye through the very minutest vein and artery, and the victim is painfully conscious of the opening and closing of every valve in his body, while the heart becomes a mighty engine, the roar of whose machinery causes the earth to vibrate.

There is something infinitely ludicrous in many of the freaks which the demon of hasheesh plays with the imagination. Mr. Taylor imagined himself a mass of transparent jelly, which a confectioner was pouring into a twisted mould; he writhed in agonizing contortions in endeavoring to accomplish his gelatinous destiny, and had so far succeeded that only one foot remained outside, when another mould of more crooked and intricate shape was substituted. He was so convulsed with laughter at his own movements that the tears flowed from his eyes in streams,— but judge of his amazement, when "every drop that fell immediately became a large loaf of bread, and tumbled on the shop-board of a baker at Damascus." The more he laughed, the faster fell the loaves, until the poor baker seemed to be in imminent peril of his life. At another time Mr. Taylor was standing on the top of the great pyramid of Cheops, when he suddenly discovered that it was not built of limestone, as previous travellers had foolishly supposed, but of huge, square plugs of Cavendish tobacco. A friend of his, who had taken hasheesh at the same time, suddenly sprang to the floor, crying, with a shriek of laughter, "Ye gods! I am a locomotive!" For two or three hours he paced the room with meas.