The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866

Those were the days of the Morus multicaulis mania, and I embarked with spirit in the silk-worm business. The original capital upon which I erected the enterprise was furnished from the surplus of Aunt Judy's wages. It was in the first silk dress that should come of all those moths and eggs and wriggling spinners and cocoons that she invested with such sanguine cheerfulness; and although she never got her money back in that form,—owing to the unfortunate exhaustion of my mulberry-leaves and the refusal of my worms to spin silk from tea, which, they being of pure Chinese stock, I thought very unreasonable,—she conceived that she reaped abundant returns in her share of my happy enthusiasm, while it lasted; and when I wept over the famine-stricken forms of my operatives, she said, "Never mind, honey; dey was an awful litter anyhow, and I spec' dey was only de or'nary caterpillar poor trash, after all, else dey 'd a-kep' goin' on dat tea; fur 't was de rale high-price Chany kind, sure 's ye 'r born."

It was a striking oddness in the dear old soul, that, whilst in her hours of familiar ease she indulged in the homely lingo of her tribe, in her "company talk" she displayed a graver propriety of language, and in her prayers was always fluent, forcible, and correct.

The watchful tenderness with which I loved my gentle, childlike father was the most interesting of the many secrets that my heart shared only with Aunt Judy's. When I was twelve years old, he fell into a touching despondency, caused by certain reverses in his business and the unremitting anxieties consequent upon them. So intense and sensitive was my magnetic sympathy with him, that I contracted the same sadness, in a form so aggravated and morbid that the despondency, in me, became despair, and the anxiety horror. The cruel fancy took possession of my mind, installed there by my treacherously imaginative temperament, that some awful calamity was about to befall my dear father; that he, patient, submissive Christian that he was, even meditated suicide; and that shape of fear so shook my soul with terror in the daytime, so filled my dreams with horror in the night, that, as if it were not myself, I turn back to pity the poor child now, and wonder that he did not go mad.

Does he know the truth now up in Heaven, the beloved old man? Surely; for the beloved old woman, who alone knew it on earth, is she not there? He knows now how his selfish, wilful, school-hating scamp, of whom only he and Aunt Judy ever boded any good, stole away from his playmates and his games, every afternoon when school was dismissed, and with that baleful phantom before him, and that doleful cry in his ears, flew through the bustle and clatter of the wharves to where his father's warehouse was, two miles away; and, dodging like a thief among crates and boxes, bales and casks, and choking down the appeal of his lonely, shame-faced terror, watched that door with all the eager, tenacious, panting fidelity of a dog, until the merchant came forth on his way homeward for the night. And how the scamp followed, dodging, watching, trembling, unconsciously moaning, unconsciously sobbing, seeing no form but his, hearing no sound but his footfall, keeping cunningly between that form and the dock, lest it should suddenly dart, through the drays and the moored vessels and plunge into the river, as the scamp had seen it do in his dreams. And how, at the end of that walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, when we reached our own door, and the simple-hearted, good old man passed in, as ignorant of my following as he was innocent of the monstrous purpose I imputed to him, I lingered some minutes at the gate to ease with a sluice of tears my pent-up fears and pains; and then burst into the yard, whistling, whooping, prancing, swinging my satchel, without feeling or manners,—a shameless, heartless brat and nuisance. And how, when the day, with all its secret sighs and sobs, was over, and he and I retired to the same bed, I prayed to our Father in heaven (muffling my very thoughts in the bed-clothes lest he should hear them) to keep my earthly father safe for me from all the formless dangers of the darkness; and how, when at the first gray streak of dawn the spectre shook me, and I awoke, I held my heart and my breathing still, to listen for his breathing, and thanked God when he groaned in his sleep; and how, when his shaving-water was brought and he stood before the glass, baring his throat, I crept close behind him, still watching, gasping,—now pretending to hum a tune, now pressing my hand upon my mouth lest I should shriek in my helpless suspense; and how, when he drew the razor from its sheath—Well! I am forty years old now, and I have been pursued since then by so many and such torturing shapes of desperation and dismay as should refresh the heart of my stupidest enemy with an emotion of relenting; but I would consent to weep, groan, rave them all over again, beginning where that haunted child left off, rather than begin where he began, though my spectres should forever vanish with his.

Aunt Judy trembled and watched with me, and, accepting my phantom as if it were a reasonable fear, hid away her share of the sacred secret in her heart, and helped me to cover up mine with a disguise of carelessness, lest any foolish or brutal mockery should find it out.

My darling had but few superstitions: her spiritually informed intelligence rose superior to vulgar signs and dreams, and saw through the little warnings and wonders of darker and less pure minds with a science of its own, which she called Gospel light. Still, there was here a sign and there a legend that she clung to for old acquaintance' sake, rather than by reason of any credulity in her strong enough to take the place of faith. But these constituted the peculiar poetry of her personality, the fireside balladry and folk-lore of her Aunt-Judyness; and I could no more mock them than I could mock the good fairy in her, that changed all my floggings to feathers,—no sooner tear away their comfortable homeliness to jeer at their honored absurdity, than I could snatch off her dear familiar turban to mock the silver reverence of her "wool." Ah! I wish you could have heard her tell me that I must pass through fourteen years of trouble,—seven on account of the big old mirror in the parlor that I, lying on the sofa beneath it, kicked clear off its hook and into the middle of the floor,—and seven for that very looking-glass which my father used to shave by, and which I, sparring at my image in it, to amuse my little brother, knocked into smithareens with my fractious fist. Why, man, it was not only awful, it all came true.

Aunt Judy, like most of those antiques, the old-fashioned house-servants of the South,—coachmen and waiters, nurses and lady's maids,—was a towering aristocrat: she believed in blood, and was a connoisseur in pedigrees. Her family pride was lofty, vast, and imposing, and embraced in the scope of its sympathy whoever could boast of a family Bible containing a well-filled record of births, marriages, and deaths,—a dear dead-and-gone inheritance of family portraits, lace, trinkets, and silver spoons,—a family vault in an Orthodox burial-ground,—and above all, one or two venerable family servants, just to show "dese mushroom folks, wid der high-minded notions, how diff'ent things was in ole missus's time!" Measured by this standard, if you had the misfortune to be a nobody, Aunt Judy, as a lady, might patronize you, as a Christian, would cheerfully advise and assist you; but to the exclusive privilege of what she superbly styled family-arities, you must in vain aspire. Our family, in the broadest sense of that word, was a large one,—by blood and marriage a numerous connection; and when Aunt Judy said, "So-and-so b'longs to our family," she included every man, woman, and child who could produce the genuine patent of our nobility, and especially all who had ever worn our livery, from my great-grandfather's tremendous coachman to the slipshod young gal that "nussed" our last new cousin's last new baby. Sometimes one of these cousins—quite telescopic, so distant was the relationship—would come to dine with us. Then Aunt Judy, in gorgeous turban, immaculate neckerchief, and lively satisfaction, would be served up in state, our pièce de résistance. The guest would compliment her with sympathetic inquiries about the state of her health, which was always "only tol'able," or "ra-a-ther poorly," or it "did 'pear as ef she could shuffle round a leetle yit, praise de Master! But she was a-gettin' older and shacklier every day; her cough was awful tryin' sometimes, and it 'peared as ef she warn't of much account, nohow. But de Lord's will be done; when He wanted her, she reckined He'd call. And how does you find yourself, Miss? And how does your ma git along wid de servants now? You know she always was a great hand to be pertickler, Miss; we hadn't sich another young lady in our family, to be pertickler, as your ma, Miss,—'specially 'bout de pleetin' and clare-starchin'."

I have to accuse myself of habitually shocking her aristocratic sensibilities by profanely ignoring, in favor of the society of dirty little plebeians, the relations to whom the sacred charm of a common ancestry should have drawn me. "Make haste, honey," she used to say; "wash yer face and hands, and pull up yer stockin's, and tie yer shoes, and bresh de sand out of yer hair, and blow yer nose, and go into de parlor, and shake hands wid yer Cousin Jorjana." But I would not. "O bother, Auntie! who's my Cousin Georgiana?" "Why, honey, don't you know? Miss Arabella Jane—dat's your dear dead-an'-gone grandma's second cousin—had seven childern by her first husband,—he was a Patterson,—and nine by her second,—he was a McKim,—and five—but 'tain't no use, honey; you don't 'pear to take no int'res' in yer own kith and kin, no more dan or'nary white trash. I 'spec' you don't know de diff'ence, dis minnit, 'twixt yer poor old Aunt Judy and any no-account poor-house nigger." And so my Cousin Georgiana, of whom I had never heard before, remains a myth to me, one of Aunt Judy's Mrs. Harrises, to this day. It was wonderful what an exact descriptive list of them she could call at a moment's notice; and for keeping the run of their names and numbers, she was as good as an enrolling officer or a directory man. "Our family" could boast of many Pharisees, as well as blush for many prodigals; but her sympathies were wholly with the latter; and for these she was eternally killing fatted calves, in spite of angry elder brothers and the whole sect of whited sepulchres, who forgive exactly four hundred and ninety times by the multiplication-table, and compass sea and land to make one hypocrite. If she had had a fold of her own, all her sheep would have been black.

One day in January, 1849, I called to see Aunt Judy for the last time. Superannuated, and rapidly failing, she had been installed by my father in a comfortable room in the house of a sort of cousin of hers, a worthy and "well-to-do" woman of color, where she might be cheered by the visits of the more respectable people of her own class,—darkies of substantial character and of the first families, among whom she was esteemed as a mother in Israel. Thither either my father or one or two of his children came every day, to watch her declining health, to administer to her comfort, and to wait upon her with those offices of respect to which she had earned her right by three quarters of a century of humble, patient love and faithful service. My chest was packed, and on the morrow I must sail for the ends of the earth; but she knew nothing of that. All that afternoon we talked together as we had never talked before; and many an injury that my indignant tears had kept fresh and sticky was "dried" in the warmth of her earnest, anxious peace-making, and "rubbed out" then and there. No page of my inditing could be pure enough to record it all; but is it not written in the Book of Life, among the regrets and the forgivenesses, the confessions and the consolations and the hopes?

The last word I ever uttered to Aunt Judy was a careful, loving, pious lie. She said, "Won't you come ag'in to-morrow, son, and see de poor ole woman?" And I replied, "O yes, Auntie!"—though I well knew that, even as I spoke, I was looking into the wise truth of those patient, tender eyes for the last time in this world. The sun was going down as we parted,—that sun has never risen again for me.

In June, 1850, on board a steamboat in the Sacramento River, I received the very Bible I had first learned to read in, sitting on her lap by the kitchen fire,—in the beginning was the Word. She was dead; and, dying, she had sent it me, with her blessing,—at the end was the Word.

In August, 1852, that Bible was tossed ashore from a wreck in an Indian river, and by angels delivered at a mission school in the jungle, where other heathens beside myself have doubtless learned from it the Word that was, and is, and ever shall be. On the inside of the cover, sitting on her lap by the kitchen fire, I had written, with appropriate "pot-hooks and hangers," Aunt Judy.

Such her quiet consummation and renown!

THE CHIMNEY-CORNER FOR 1866

VII

BODILY RELIGION: A SERMON ON GOOD HEALTH

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 fulness 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 devilled 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 fulness of the life of childhood? Experience has shown that the delicious freshness of this dawning hour may be preserved even to mid-day, 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 châlets 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 maybe 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 travelling 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 travelling 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 traveller 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 travelling 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 travellers; 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, pop-corn, 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 bed-chamber 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 travellers 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 travellers.

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 maybe 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 commonly 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 down-trodden, 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 practise 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?

GRIFFITH GAUNT; OR, JEALOUSY

CHAPTER XXVIII

The bill was paid; the black horse saddled and brought round to the door. Mr. and Mrs. Vint stood bare-headed to honor the parting guest; and the latter offered him the stirrup-cup.

Griffith looked round for Mercy. She was nowhere to be seen.

Then he said, piteously, to Mrs. Vint, "What, not even bid me good by?"

Mrs. Vint replied, in a very low voice, that there was no disrespect intended. "The truth is, sir, she could not trust herself to see you go; but she bade me give you a message. Says she, 'Mother, tell him I pray God to bless him, go where he will.'"