THE
BIBLE OF NATURE;
OR, THE
PRINCIPLES OF SECULARISM.
A Contribution to the Religion of the Future.
BY
FELIX L. OSWALD.
“Light is help from Heaven.”—G. E. Lessing.
New York:
THE TRUTH SEEKER COMPANY,
28 LAFAYETTE PLACE.
TO
THE MEMORY OF
BENEDICT SPINOZA,
THIS WORK IS REVERENTLY DEDICATED
BY THE AUTHOR.
CONTENTS.
PAGE.
Introduction, 9
PHYSICAL MAXIMS.
CHAP.
I. Health, 18
II. Strength, 33
III. Chastity, 45
IV. Temperance, 56
V. Skill, 73
MENTAL MAXIMS.
VI. Knowledge, 85
VII. Independence, 95
VIII. Prudence, 106
IX. Perseverance, 116
X. Freethought, 124
MORAL MAXIMS.
XI. Justice, 137
XII. Truth, 148
XIII. Humanity, 160
XIV. Friendship, 172
XV. Education, 182
OBJECTIVE MAXIMS.
XVI. Forest Culture, 194
XVII. Recreation, 203
XVIII. Domestic Reform, 212
XIX. Legislative Reform, 221
XX. The Priesthood of Secularism, 231
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
preördained 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” (while half the arable territory of France was in the hands of the
church). “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” (Man and Nature, pp. 4, 43).
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.
I.—PHYSICAL MAXIMS.
CHAPTER I.
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. Cæsar 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
(interspersed with parks and gardens), 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 zoölogical
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 Thermæ, 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 (by no means confined to the combats of
armed prize-fighters) 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.