The heart that gave them birth, to woe
Whose loveliness was wedded so-
"Though all the world be sad," I said,
"I can not weep that he is dead!"

THE MORAL DIAGNOSIS OF DISEASE.

BY A PENITENT INVALID.

VIII.

MANI says, The populousness of my body is the solitude of my soul.

The Body stood very much in the way of the old Oriental philosophies and speculations. The teachers generally agree to locate therein the Order of the Hells. Plotinus affirmed that he was ashamed of his body, and even Plato seems to think that no man could love his body and the gods too. The idea was, that the head was the man, and was, originally, the only thing; it rolled along on the earth. Afterward the body was built, that this Observatory with the Telescope swung in it might have a higher point of prospect, and might be better protected. So the body was only wall, stairway and roof for the man. The animosity which arose against it was owing to the fact that instead of the body's devoting itself to the soul, the soul had to take up all its time in attending this usurping body. Paul evidently shared this animosity, and speaks of beating his body black and blue (úñо¬ìašoμai) to keep it in subjection.

Before the clear vision of Mani those prison-walls, so grey and hard to others, became thin air, through which the spirit might at any time wing its way with ease. He saw the high uses of his bodily functions: they were not to multiply his cares and complicate his earthly relations,-they were to relieve him of them. In health the Soul can sit in solitude, forgetting the outside world. Has she not hundreds of messengers and domestics running up and down the myriad paths of the system, attending to the lower cares and wants? Has the king a trustworthy cabinet, faithful ministers, invincible soldiers, a watchful body-guard,—then may he rest at case in his palace. But how can a man think who has a toothache? How can a man forget his body in any ecstacy who has the asthma ?

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.