One of our recent writers has said, that "good health is physical
religion;" and it is a saying worthy to be printed in golden letters.
But good health being physical religion, it fully shares that
indifference with which the human race regards things confessedly the
most important. The neglect of the soul is the trite theme of all
religious teachers; and, next to their souls, there is nothing that
people neglect so much as their bodies. Every person ought to be
perfectly healthy, just as everybody ought to be perfectly religious;
but, in point of fact, the greater part of mankind are so far from
perfect moral or physical religion that they cannot even form a
conception of the blessing beyond them.
The mass of good, well-meaning Christians are not yet advanced enough
to guess at the change which a perfect fidelity to Christ's spirit and
precepts would produce in them. And the majority of people who call
themselves well, because they are not, at present, upon any particular
doctor's list, are not within sight of what perfect health would be.
That fullness of life, that vigorous tone, and that elastic
cheerfulness, which make the mere fact of existence a luxury, that
suppleness which carries one like a well-built boat over every wave of
unfavorable chance,--these are attributes of the perfect health seldom
enjoyed. We see them in young children, in animals, and now and then,
but rarely, in some adult human being, who has preserved intact the
religion of the body through all opposing influences. Perfect health
supposes not a state of mere quiescence, but of positive enjoyment in
living. See that little fellow, as his nurse turns him out in the
morning, fresh from his bath, his hair newly curled, and his cheeks
polished like apples. Every step is a spring or a dance; he runs, he
laughs, he shouts, his face breaks into a thousand dimpling smiles at
a word. His breakfast of plain bread and milk is swallowed with an
eager and incredible delight,--it is so good that he stops to laugh or
thump the table now and then in expression of his ecstasy. All day
long he runs and frisks and plays; and when at night the little head
seeks the pillow, down go the eye-curtains, and sleep comes without a
dream. In the morning his first note is a laugh and a crow, as he sits
up in his crib and tries to pull papa's eyes open with his fat
fingers. He is an embodied joy,--he is sunshine and music and laughter
for all the house. With what a magnificent generosity does the Author
of life endow a little mortal pilgrim in giving him at the outset of
his career such a body as this! How miserable it is to look forward
twenty years, when the same child, now grown a man, wakes in the
morning with a dull, heavy head, the consequence of smoking and
studying till twelve or one the night before; when he rises languidly
to a late breakfast, and turns from this and tries that,--wants a
deviled bone, or a cutlet with Worcestershire sauce, to make eating
possible; and then, with slow and plodding step, finds his way to his
office and his books. Verily the shades of the prison-house gather
round the growing boy; for, surely, no one will deny that life often
begins with health little less perfect than that of the angels.
But the man who habitually wakes sodden, headachy, and a little
stupid, and who needs a cup of strong coffee and various stimulating
condiments to coax his bodily system into something like fair working
order, does not suppose he is out of health. He says, "Very well, I
thank you," to your inquiries,--merely because he has entirely
forgotten what good health is. He is well, not because of any
particular pleasure in physical existence, but well simply because he
is not a subject for prescriptions. Yet there is no store of vitality,
no buoyancy, no superabundant vigor, to resist the strain and pressure
to which life puts him. A checked perspiration, a draught of air
ill-timed, a crisis of perplexing business or care, and he is down
with a bilious attack or an influenza, and subject to doctors' orders
for an indefinite period. And if the case be so with men, how is it
with women? How many women have at maturity the keen appetite, the
joyous love of life and motion, the elasticity and sense of physical
delight in existence, that little children have? How many have any
superabundance of vitality with which to meet the wear and strain of
life? And yet they call themselves well.
But is it possible, in maturity, to have the joyful fullness of the
life of childhood? Experience has shown that the delicious freshness
of this dawning hour may be preserved even to midday, and may be
brought back and restored after it has been for years a stranger.
Nature, though a severe disciplinarian, is still, in many respects,
most patient and easy to be entreated, and meets any repentant
movement of her prodigal children with wonderful condescension. Take
Bulwer's account of the first few weeks of his sojourn at Malvern,
and you will read, in very elegant English, the story of an
experience of pleasure which has surprised and delighted many a
patient at a water-cure. The return to the great primitive elements
of health--water, air, and simple food, with a regular system of
exercise--has brought to many a jaded, weary, worn-down human being
the elastic spirits, the simple, eager appetite, the sound sleep, of
a little child. Hence the rude huts and chalets of the peasant
Priessnitz were crowded with battered dukes and princesses and
notables of every degree, who came from the hot, enervating luxury
which had drained them of existence, to find a keener pleasure in
peasants' bread under peasants' roofs than in soft raiment and
palaces. No arts of French cookery can possibly make anything taste
so well to a feeble and palled appetite as plain brown bread and milk
taste to a hungry water-cure patient, fresh from bath and exercise.
If the water-cure had done nothing more than establish the fact that
the glow and joyousness of early life are things which may be restored
after having been once wasted, it would have done a good work. For if
Nature is so forgiving to those who have once lost or have squandered
her treasures, what may not be hoped for us if we can learn the art of
never losing the first health of childhood? And though with us, who
have passed to maturity, it may be too late for the blessing, cannot
something be done for the children who are yet to come after us?
Why is the first health of childhood lost? Is it not the answer, that
childhood is the only period of life in which bodily health is made a
prominent object? Take our pretty boy, with cheeks like apples, who
started in life with a hop, skip, and dance,--to whom laughter was
like breathing, and who was enraptured with plain bread and milk,--how
did he grow into the man who wakes so languid and dull, who wants
strong coffee and Worcestershire sauce to make his breakfast go down?
When and where did he drop the invaluable talisman that once made
everything look brighter and taste better to him, however rude and
simple, than now do the most elaborate combinations? What is the boy's
history? Why, for the first seven years of his life his body is made
of some account. It is watched, cared for, dieted, disciplined, fed
with fresh air, and left to grow and develop like a thrifty plant. But
from the time school education begins, the body is steadily ignored,
and left to take care of itself.
The boy is made to sit six hours a day in a close, hot room, breathing
impure air, putting the brain and the nervous system upon a constant
strain, while the muscular system is repressed to an unnatural quiet.
During the six hours, perhaps twenty minutes are allowed for all that
play of the muscles which, up to this time, has been the constant
habit of his life. After this he is sent home with books, slate, and
lessons to occupy an hour or two more in preparing for the next day.
In the whole of this time there is no kind of effort to train the
physical system by appropriate exercise. Something of the sort was
attempted years ago in the infant schools, but soon given up; and now,
from the time study first begins, the muscles are ignored in all
primary schools. One of the first results is the loss of that animal
vigor which formerly made the boy love motion for its own sake. Even
in his leisure hours he no longer leaps and runs as he used to; he
learns to sit still, and by and by sitting and lounging come to be the
habit, and vigorous motion the exception, for most of the hours of the
day. The education thus begun goes on from primary to high school,
from high school to college, from college through professional studies
of law, medicine, or theology, with this steady contempt for the body,
with no provision for its culture, training, or development, but
rather a direct and evident provision for its deterioration and
decay.
The want of suitable ventilation in school-rooms, recitation-rooms,
lecture-rooms, offices, court-rooms, conference-rooms, and vestries,
where young students of law, medicine, and theology acquire their
earlier practice, is something simply appalling. Of itself it would
answer for men the question, why so many thousand glad, active
children come to a middle life without joy,--a life whose best estate
is a sort of slow, plodding endurance. The despite and hatred which
most men seem to feel for God's gift of fresh air, and their
resolution to breathe as little of it as possible, could only come
from a long course of education, in which they have been accustomed to
live without it. Let any one notice the conduct of our American
people traveling in railroad cars. We will suppose that about half of
them are what might be called well-educated people, who have learned
in books, or otherwise, that the air breathed from the lungs is laden
with impurities,--that it is noxious and poisonous; and yet, travel
with these people half a day, and you would suppose from their actions
that they considered the external air as a poison created expressly to
injure them, and that the only course of safety lay in keeping the
cars hermetically sealed, and breathing over and over the vapor from
each others' lungs. If a person in despair at the intolerable foulness
raises a window, what frowns from all the neighboring seats,
especially from great rough-coated men, who always seem the first to
be apprehensive! The request to "put down that window" is almost sure
to follow a moment or two of fresh air. In vain have rows of
ventilators been put in the tops of some of the cars, for conductors
and passengers are both of one mind, that these ventilators are inlets
of danger, and must be kept carefully closed.
Railroad traveling in America is systematically, and one would think
carefully, arranged so as to violate every possible law of health. The
old rule to keep the head cool and the feet warm is precisely
reversed. A red-hot stove heats the upper stratum of air to
oppression, while a stream of cold air is constantly circulating about
the lower extremities. The most indigestible and unhealthy substances
conceivable are generally sold in the cars or at way-stations for the
confusion and distress of the stomach. Rarely can a traveler obtain so
innocent a thing as a plain good sandwich of bread and meat, while
pie, cake, doughnuts, and all other culinary atrocities are almost
forced upon him at every stopping-place. In France, England, and
Germany, the railroad cars are perfectly ventilated; the feet are kept
warm by flat cases filled with hot water and covered with carpet, and
answering the double purpose of warming the feet and diffusing an
agreeable temperature through the car, without burning away the
vitality of the air; while the arrangements at the refreshment-rooms
provide for the passenger as wholesome and well-served a meal of
healthy, nutritious food as could be obtained in any home circle.
What are we to infer concerning the home habits of a nation of men who
so resignedly allow their bodies to be poisoned and maltreated in
traveling over such an extent of territory as is covered by our
railroad lines? Does it not show that foul air and improper food are
too much matters of course to excite attention? As a writer in "The
Nation" has lately remarked, it is simply and only because the
American nation like to have unventilated cars, and to be fed on pie
and coffee at stopping-places, that nothing better is known to our
travelers; if there were any marked dislike of such a state of things
on the part of the people, it would not exist. We have wealth enough,
and enterprise enough, and ingenuity enough, in our American nation,
to compass with wonderful rapidity any end that really seems to us
desirable. An army was improvised when an army was wanted,--and an
army more perfectly equipped, more bountifully fed, than so great a
body of men ever was before. Hospitals, Sanitary Commissions, and
Christian Commissions all arose out of the simple conviction of the
American people that they must arise. If the American people were
equally convinced that foul air was a poison,--that to have cold feet
and hot heads was to invite an attack of illness,--that maple-sugar,
popcorn, peppermint candy, pie, doughnuts, and peanuts are not diet
for reasonable beings,--they would have railroad accommodations very
different from those now in existence.
We have spoken of the foul air of court-rooms. What better illustration
could be given of the utter contempt with which the laws of bodily
health are treated, than the condition of these places? Our lawyers
are our highly educated men. They have been through high-school and
college training, they have learned the properties of oxygen,
nitrogen, and carbonic-acid gas, and have seen a mouse die under an
exhausted receiver, and of course they know that foul, unventilated
rooms are bad for the health; and yet generation after generation of
men so taught and trained will spend the greater part of their lives
in rooms notorious for their close and impure air, without so much as
an attempt to remedy the evil. A well-ventilated court-room is a
four-leaved clover among court-rooms. Young men are constantly losing
their health at the bar; lung diseases, dyspepsia, follow them up,
gradually sapping their vitality. Some of the brightest ornaments of the
profession have actually fallen dead as they stood pleading,--victims
of the fearful pressure of poisonous and heated air upon the excited
brain. The deaths of Salmon P. Chase of Portland, uncle of our present
Chief Justice, and of Ezekiel Webster, the brother of our great
statesman, are memorable examples of the calamitous effects of the
errors dwelt upon; and yet, strange to say, nothing efficient is done
to mend these errors, and give the body an equal chance with the mind in
the pressure of the world's affairs.
But churches, lecture-rooms, and vestries, and all buildings
devoted especially to the good of the soul, are equally witness of
the mind's disdain of the body's needs, and the body's consequent
revenge upon the soul. In how many of these places has the question
of a thorough provision of fresh air been even considered? People
would never think of bringing a thousand persons into a desert place
and keeping them there without making preparations to feed them.
Bread and butter, potatoes and meat, must plainly be found for them;
but a thousand human beings are put into a building to remain a given
number of hours, and no one asks the question whether means exist
for giving each one the quantum of fresh air needed for his
circulation, and these thousand victims will consent to be slowly
poisoned, gasping, sweating, getting red in the face, with confused
and sleepy brains, while a minister with a yet redder face and a
more oppressed brain struggles and wrestles, through the hot, seething
vapors, to make clear to them the mysteries of faith. How many
churches are there that for six or eight months in the year are never
ventilated at all, except by the accidental opening of doors? The
foul air generated by one congregation is locked up by the sexton
for the use of the next assembly; and so gathers and gathers from
week to week, and month to month, while devout persons upbraid
themselves, and are ready to tear their hair, because they always
feel stupid and sleepy in church. The proper ventilation of their
churches and vestries would remove that spiritual deadness of which
their prayers and hymns complain. A man hoeing his corn out on a
breezy hillside is bright and alert, his mind works clearly, and he
feels interested in religion, and thinks of many a thing that might
be said at the prayer-meeting at night. But at night, when he sits
down in a little room where the air reeks with the vapor of his
neighbor's breath and the smoke of kerosene lamps, he finds
himself suddenly dull and drowsy,--without emotion, without thought,
without feeling,--and he rises and reproaches himself for this
state of things. He calls upon his soul and all that is within him
to bless the Lord; but the indignant body, abused, insulted,
ignored, takes the soul by the throat, and says, "If you won't let
_me_ have a good time, neither shall you." Revivals of religion,
with ministers and with those people whose moral organization leads
them to take most interest in them, often end in periods of bodily
ill health and depression. But is there any need of this? Suppose
that a revival of religion required, as a formula, that all the
members of a given congregation should daily take a minute dose of
arsenic in concert,--we should not be surprised after a while to
hear of various ill effects therefrom; and, as vestries and
lecture-rooms are now arranged, a daily prayer-meeting is often
nothing more nor less than a number of persons spending half an
hour a day breathing poison from each other's lungs. There is not
only no need of this, but, on the contrary, a good supply of pure
air would make the daily prayer-meeting far more enjoyable. The body,
if allowed the slightest degree of fair play, so far from being a
contumacious infidel and opposer, becomes a very fair Christian
helper, and, instead of throttling the soul, gives it wings to rise
to celestial regions.
This branch of our subject we will quit with one significant anecdote.
A certain rural church was somewhat famous for its picturesque Gothic
architecture, and equally famous for its sleepy atmosphere, the rules
of Gothic symmetry requiring very small windows, which could be only
partially opened. Everybody was affected alike in this church;
minister and people complained that it was like the enchanted ground
in the Pilgrim's Progress. Do what they would, sleep was ever at their
elbows; the blue, red, and green of the painted windows melted into a
rainbow dimness of hazy confusion; and ere they were aware, they were
off on a cloud to the land of dreams.
An energetic sister in the church suggested the inquiry, whether it
was ever ventilated, and discovered that it was regularly locked up at
the close of service, and remained so till opened for the next week.
She suggested the inquiry, whether giving the church a thorough airing
on Saturday would not improve the Sunday services; but nobody acted on
her suggestion. Finally, she borrowed the sexton's key one Saturday
night, and went into the church and opened all the windows herself,
and let them remain so for the night. The next day everybody remarked
the improved comfort of the church, and wondered what had produced the
change. Nevertheless, when it was discovered, it was not deemed a
matter of enough importance to call for an order on the sexton to
perpetuate the improvement.
The ventilation of private dwellings in this country is such as might
be expected from that entire indifference to the laws of health
manifested in public establishments. Let a person travel in private
conveyance up through the valley of the Connecticut, and stop for a
night at the taverns which he will usually find at the end of each
day's stage. The bedchamber into which he will be ushered will be the
concentration of all forms of bad air. The house is redolent of the
vegetables in the cellar,--cabbages, turnips, and potatoes; and this
fragrance is confined and retained by the custom of closing the window
blinds and dropping the inside curtains, so that neither air nor
sunshine enters in to purify. Add to this the strong odor of a new
feather bed and pillows, and you have a combination of perfumes most
appalling to a delicate sense. Yet travelers take possession of these
rooms, sleep in them all night without raising the window or opening
the blinds, and leave them to be shut up for other travelers.
The spare chamber of many dwellings seems to be an hermetically closed
box, opened only twice a year, for spring and fall cleaning; but for
the rest of the time closed to the sun and the air of heaven. Thrifty
country housekeepers often adopt the custom of making their beds on
the instant after they are left, without airing the sheets and
mattresses; and a bed so made gradually becomes permeated with the
insensible emanations of the human body, so as to be a steady
corrupter of the atmosphere.
In the winter, the windows are calked and listed, the throat of the
chimney built up with a tight brick wall, and a close stove is
introduced to help burn out the vitality of the air. In a sitting-room
like this, from five to ten persons will spend about eight months of
the year, with no other ventilation than that gained by the casual
opening and shutting of doors. Is it any wonder that consumption
every year sweeps away its thousands?--that people are suffering
constant chronic ailments,--neuralgia, nervous dyspepsia, and all the
host of indefinite bad feelings that rob life of sweetness and flower
and bloom?
A recent writer raises the inquiry, whether the community would not
gain in health by the demolition of all dwelling-houses. That is, he
suggests the question, whether the evils from foul air are not so
great and so constant that they countervail the advantages of shelter.
Consumptive patients far gone have been known to be cured by long
journeys, which have required them to be day and night in the open
air. Sleep under the open heaven, even though the person be exposed to
the various accidents of weather, has often proved a miraculous
restorer after everything else had failed. But surely, if simple fresh
air is so healing and preserving a thing, some means might be found to
keep the air in a house just as pure and vigorous as it is outside.
An article in the May number of "Harpers' Magazine" presents drawings
of a very simple arrangement by which any house can be made thoroughly
self-ventilating. Ventilation, as this article shows, consists in two
things,--a perfect and certain expulsion from the dwelling of all foul
air breathed from the lungs or arising from any other cause, and the
constant supply of pure air.
One source of foul air cannot be too much guarded against,--we mean
imperfect gas-pipes. A want of thoroughness in execution is the sin of
our American artisans, and very few gas-fixtures are so thoroughly
made that more or less gas does not escape and mingle with the air of
the dwelling. There are parlors where plants cannot be made to live,
because the gas kills them; and yet their occupants do not seem to
reflect that an air in which a plant cannot live must be dangerous for
a human being. The very clemency and long-suffering of Nature to those
who persistently violate her laws is one great cause why men are,
physically speaking, such sinners as they are. If foul air poisoned at
once and completely, we should have well-ventilated houses, whatever
else we failed to have. But because people can go on for weeks,
months, and years breathing poisons, and slowly and imperceptibly
lowering the tone of their vital powers, and yet be what they call
"pretty well, I thank you," sermons on ventilation and fresh air go by
them as an idle song. "I don't see but we are well enough, and we
never took much pains about these things. There's air enough gets into
houses, of course. What with doors opening and windows occasionally
lifted, the air of houses is generally good enough;"--and so the
matter is dismissed.
One of Heaven's great hygienic teachers is now abroad in the world,
giving lessons on health to the children of men. The cholera is like
the angel whom God threatened to send as leader to the rebellious
Israelites. "Beware of him, obey his voice, and provoke him not; for
he will not pardon your transgressions." The advent of this fearful
messenger seems really to be made necessary by the contempt with which
men treat the physical laws of their being. What else could have
purified the dark places of New York? What a wiping-up and reforming
and cleansing is going before him through the country! At last we find
that Nature is in earnest, and that her laws cannot be always ignored
with impunity. Poisoned air is recognized at last as an evil,--even
although the poison cannot be weighed, measured, or tasted; and if all
the precautions that men are now willing to take could be made
perpetual, the alarm would be a blessing to the world.
Like the principles of spiritual religion, the principles of physical
religion are few and easy to be understood. An old medical apothegm
personifies the hygienic forces as the Doctors Air, Diet, Exercise,
and Quiet: and these four will be found, on reflection, to cover the
whole ground of what is required to preserve human health. A human
being whose lungs have always been nourished by pure air, whose
stomach has been fed only by appropriate food, whose muscles have been
systematically trained by appropriate exercises, and whose mind is
kept tranquil by faith in God and a good conscience, has perfect
physical religion. There is a line where physical religion must
necessarily overlap spiritual religion and rest upon it. No human
being can be assured of perfect health, through all the strain and
wear and tear of such cares and such perplexities as life brings,
without the rest of faith in God. An unsubmissive, unconfiding,
unresigned soul will make vain the best hygienic treatment; and, on
the contrary, the most saintly religious resolution and purpose may be
defeated and vitiated by an habitual ignorance and disregard of the
laws of the physical system.
Perfect spiritual religion cannot exist without perfect physical
religion. Every flaw and defect in the bodily system is just so much
taken from the spiritual vitality: we are commanded to glorify
God, not simply in our spirits, but in our bodies and spirits. The
only example of perfect manhood the world ever saw impresses us
more than anything else by an atmosphere of perfect healthiness.
There is a calmness, a steadiness, in the character of Jesus, a
naturalness in his evolution of the sublimest truths under the strain
of the most absorbing and intense excitement, that could come only
from the one perfectly trained and developed body, bearing as a
pure and sacred shrine the One Perfect Spirit. Jesus of Nazareth,
journeying on foot from city to city, always calm yet always
fervent, always steady yet glowing with a white heat of sacred
enthusiasm, able to walk and teach all day and afterwards to
continue in prayer all night, with unshaken nerves, sedately
patient, serenely reticent, perfectly self-controlled, walked the
earth, the only man that perfectly glorified God in His body no less
than in His spirit. It is worthy of remark, that in choosing His
disciples He chose plain men from the laboring classes, who had
lived the most obediently to the simple, unperverted laws of nature.
He chose men of good and pure bodies,--simple, natural, childlike,
healthy men,--and baptized their souls with the inspiration of the
Holy Spirit.
The hygienic bearings of the New Testament have never been sufficiently
understood. The basis of them lies in the solemn declaration, that
our bodies are to be temples of the Holy Spirit, and that all abuse
of them is of the nature of sacrilege. Reverence for the physical
system, as the outward shrine and temple of the spiritual, is the
peculiarity of the Christian religion. The doctrine of the resurrection
of the body, and its physical immortality, sets the last crown of honor
upon it. That bodily system which God declared worthy to be gathered
back from the dust of the grave, and re-created, as the soul's immortal
companion, must necessarily be dear and precious in the eyes of its
Creator. The one passage in the New Testament in which it is spoken of
disparagingly is where Paul contrasts it with the brighter glory of
what is to come: "He shall change our vile bodies, that they may be
fashioned like his glorious body." From this passage has come abundance
of reviling of the physical system. Memoirs of good men are full of
abuse of it, as the clog, the load, the burden, the chain. It is
spoken of as pollution, as corruption,--in short, one would think that
the Creator had imitated the cruelty of some Oriental despots who
have been known to chain a festering corpse to a living body.
Accordingly, the memoirs of these pious men are also mournful
records of slow suicide, wrought by the persistent neglect of the most
necessary and important laws of the bodily system; and the body,
outraged and downtrodden, has turned traitor to the soul, and played
the adversary with fearful power. Who can tell the countless temptations
to evil which flow in from a neglected, disordered, deranged
nervous system,--temptations to anger, to irritability, to selfishness,
to every kind of sin of appetite and passion? No wonder that the poor
soul longs for the hour of release from such a companion.
But that human body which God declares expressly was made to be the
temple of the Holy Spirit, which he considers worthy to be perpetuated
by a resurrection and an immortal existence, cannot be intended to be
a clog and a hindrance to spiritual advancement. A perfect body,
working in perfect tune and time, would open glimpses of happiness to
the soul approaching the joys we hope for in heaven. It is only
through the images of things which our bodily senses have taught us,
that we can form any conception of that future bliss; and the more
perfect these senses, the more perfect our conceptions must be.
The conclusion of the whole matter, and the practical application of
this sermon, is,--First, that all men set themselves to form the idea
of what perfect health is, and resolve to realize it for themselves
and their children. Second, that with a view to this they study the
religion of the body, in such simple and popular treatises as those of
George Combe, Dr. Dio Lewis, and others, and with simple and honest
hearts practice what they there learn. Third, that the training of the
bodily system should form a regular part of our common-school
education,--every common school being provided with a well-instructed
teacher of gymnastics; and the growth and development of each pupil's
body being as much noticed and marked as is now the growth of his
mind. The same course should be continued and enlarged in colleges and
female seminaries, which should have professors of hygiene appointed
to give thorough instruction concerning the laws of health.
And when this is all done, we may hope that crooked spines, pimpled
faces, sallow complexions, stooping shoulders, and all other signs
indicating an undeveloped physical vitality, will, in the course of a
few generations, disappear from the earth, and men will have bodies
which will glorify God, their great Architect.
The soul of man has got as far as it can without the body. Religion
herself stops and looks back, waiting for the body to overtake her.
The soul's great enemy and hindrance can be made her best friend and
most powerful help; and it is high time that this era were begun. We
old sinners, who have lived carelessly, and almost spent our day of
grace, may not gain much of its good; but the children,--shall there
not be a more perfect day for them? Shall there not come a day when
the little child, whom Christ set forth to his disciples as the type
of the greatest in the kingdom of heaven, shall be the type no less of
our physical than our spiritual advancement,--when men and women shall
arise, keeping through long and happy lives the simple, unperverted
appetites, the joyous freshness of spirit, the keen delight in mere
existence, the dreamless sleep and happy waking of early childhood?