should be sought after, and valued no less than beauty and power of mind. Is the development of the brain to be the supreme object of man's aspirations? A fuller wisdom will show us, that we must value equally all our parts, since no one can thrive alone. Ugliness and bodily imperfection or deformity are always marks of sin, and show us that some error has been committed, or that we have not duly sought after bodily excellence. Physical beauty, whose expression forms the glorious ideal of the painter and sculptor, is as high an aim as any other that could be proposed. For it is inseparably associated in nature's plan with all other beauties and powers, and we can attain to truth just as surely by following beauty, as by any other path. In fact all the ideals of man which are founded on a reality in nature, are equally infinite, and therefore equally capable of forming a religion. For there is not one religion, but as many religions as there are parts of nature to absorb us in their pursuit. The real religion of each man is that pursuit and that idea, which most holds his heart, and which awakens in him a lofty enthusiasm. It is the perception and feeling of the infinite, and our duty to aspire to it, to which the name of religion has ever been given. Unfortunate the pursuit and those who follow it, which has not its own equally recognised and equally reverenced religion.

Spiritualism is at present the great obstacle to this recognition; to the extension of the idea of Catholic humanity, which is now pervading the civilised world; the equal reverence for all men and for all parts of nature. It is the prevailing error of past and present times, and is not confined to our own country merely, but extends perhaps over all the globe. It is the true aristocratic element in our society, which interposes its chilling barriers between men's hearts, for where there is not equal mutual reverence, there cannot long be true love. Itself at first an advancing revolution, it has now become a stationary despotism. It has shown no quarter to its opponent materialism, which at present as a theory can scarcely be said to exist in the world, and is not therefore much to be dreaded as an evil.

It is spiritualism, that men of our age have to fear, and do what they may, they will find it almost impossible to extricate themselves from its prejudicing influence, so subtly is it interwoven in all our thoughts and feelings. For the man who has not paid equal attention to physical pursuits, and to the study of the human body in its varied phases of health and disease, must be a spiritualist, and his unequal knowledge of the different parts of our nature, while it shows his preference for the one, will bias and falsify all his views on man as a whole.

As all parts of our nature are of equal perfection, and therefore all equally claim our reverence, it cannot be for a moment allowed, that the so-called animal passions are of an inferior kind to the spiritual. They exercise an influence on man just as divine as any other, and shape and mould the human character as powerfully and as nobly. It is not the place of man to say:-"This part of my nature is more beautiful or more noble than another, let me therefore cultivate it chiefly." His duty is to study to perceive an equal beauty in all, and to endeavour that all shall be duly and equally developed.

If a healthy life be the crown of the physical virtues, death in all its forms, except the natural spontaneous one of gradual decay in old age, is the greatest of all physical sins. The gravity of a physical sin is to be measured by the severity of the disease, nature's punishment; and when death follows, the physical sin must have been the greatest. All premature deaths, therefore, are sinful, and abhorrent to physical religion, showing that the evil powers have been at work. It matters not what other noble qualities, moral or physical, the individual may have had; if he die before his time, his life is an imperfect one, and so far must be condemned.

The death of martyrdom, which has been so dangerous an example to the world, is but a confession of the imperfect state of existing things. "All men around me are sinning," says the martyr, "therefore must also sin, and submit to a mutilated career in order to save them." Beautiful, truly; but the highest ideal allows of no sacrifice of any real good. It is by no means martyrdom, or premature death in any conceivable form, that men are to aim at; but rather a physiologically perfect life, perfect in every stage, perfect in its natural termination. It is from the want of a reverence for our physical life, from an inadequate appreciation of its infinite value and majesty, and the duty that we lie under, to guard it as a most sacred possession, that the recklessness of life, both in themselves and in others, in great part arose, which has been, and still is, so dark a stain on mankind.

The grand aim of the natural and only beautiful death should be kept steadily before the eyes of all throughout life. To live and die naturally, and to help others to do the same! Have we ever thought how much of virtue, of duty, of religion, lies in this aim, apparently so simple, yet in its attainment so infinitely difficult?

As physical religion teaches us to reverence the body as highly as the spirit, so does it also teach us to view with equal reverence all the different parts and organs of the body itself. There are few things from which humanity has suffered more than from the degrading and irreverent feelings of mystery and shame that have been attached to the genital and excretory organs. The former have been regarded, like their corresponding mental passions, as something of a lower and baser nature, tending to degrade and carnalise man by their physical appetites. But we cannot take a debasing view of any part of our humanity, without becoming degraded in our whole being. It would be hard to enumerate all the evils which have flowed from this unhappy view of the genital organs; whose functions and influence are second in importance and in transcendant perfection to none. Their health and disease have been neglected, their misfortunes have called forth rather the sneer and the reproach than the divine pity and assistance which should wait upon all error, physical and moral.

I have endeavoured elsewhere, in the treatise on the sexual organs, to give a short sketch of their laws, which should be studied and obeyed by all men and women as reverentially as those of any other organs, else will their consequent ruin involve the ruin of the whole being. Before the calm eye of nature, all flimsy veils of morbid modesty, shame, and

indolence, vanish like a dream; and when she demands penalty for broken laws, such excuses die away on the lips of the offender.

In the same way that physical religion enjoins reverence for the genital organs, so does it prohibit all low and degraded ideas connected with the organs of excretion. All such are an abomination unto it, and it will not hold him guiltless who stoops to entertain them. Every one should endeavour absolutely to free his mind from these unhappy views of our ancestors, and learn to regard all parts of his body with the same reverential eye, undisturbed by feelings of mystery, shame, or disgust. Too long alas! too long have these indignities defiled our humanity, and baffled the efforts of the physician! What sufferer from the diseases of these organs has not had his woes aggravated ten-fold by these unhappy feelings! The universal study of anatomy, enjoined on all men by physical religion, will alone succeed in dissipating these morbid and irreverent ideas.

But in what direction can we turn our eyes, and not find man degraded by the want of physical reverence? Have not all the various 'classes, who follow material pursuits, become themselves degraded, from the want of a religious enthusiasm for them? Have not the physician, the artist, the actor, the labourer, and artizan, become degraded thereby? If a man have not a sufficient reverence for his pursuit, it will hang a dead weight round his neck, and sink him to the level of a mercenary drudge. It is deplorable to see the way in which some of these glorious branches of human endeavour are looked down upon, not only by society at large, but by their own followers. The noble profession of the actor or actress is viewed in so degrading a light by society that it is almost ignored. Is the perfection of art in that vocation, which forms as integral an ingredient of our social life as any others, less difficult in its attainment or less unbounded in its influence than they? In a more perfect state of society it will not be viewed so.

The interests of all concerned in physical studies or pursuits, are, no less than the physician's, bound up in the spread of physical religion. Without it, medicine is, as it has been up to this time, comparatively paralysed, and can have but a minor influence on the physical regeneration and progress of man. How can the voice of the physician be heard, if he can urge only the feeble motives of expediency, while the moralist and clergyman have at their command the armoury of duty and religion, with the array of eternal rewards and punishments, to enforce reverence for their precepts? To all of these assumptions of spiritual superiority, as it has been seen, physical religion inexorably returns a denial, while it claims, and will have from all human beings, exactly an equal share of their reverence. The individual, and the age which resist those claims shall not escape punishment, but shall surely suffer; not that it loves spirit less, but that it loves the whole man more. The true interests of the spiritualist are no less involved in this, for, where injustice is done, all must suffer.

MAN, THE PHYSICIAN.

The noble science of medicine has never yet received due reverence from mankind. This arises chiefly from the cause that has been mentioned above, namely, the want of reverence for the body, the special object of its attention. In the neglect shown to their subject, medical men have shared, and thus has the profession become a little world in itself, separated from the interests and real sympathies which only mutual understanding can give, of the main world around them. The physician, to the eyes of other men, appears as one apart, who is initiated into mysteries which their imagination dreads, yet dwells upon; who is devoted to studies, the materialising and debasing influences of which are still, in the light of the nineteenth century, vaguely whispered of, though society is now-a-days too polite to utter openly the coarse and irreverent accusations of our forefathers.

It is not, however, with the degradations of the physicians of the past that I have to do; those who will may find the records of them in history, and having studied them, will be prepared by their light to read the condition of the physician of the present. For the seeds sown by our ancestors still flourish among us, and long will be the struggle before the prejudices against medicine and its followers, and the materialising tenIt is rarely that we see in dencies of the science, be totally uprooted.

the writings, even of the most cultivated men of past times, the medical profession alluded to, except with a sneer at their low-mindedness, or expressed contempt at their want of skill. It would have been better for these writers and for society, had they rather tried themselves to solve those problems of health and disease, which medical men knew so little about.

But what was there to induce these men of lofty ambition and great powers, to devote themselves to a subject which shut them out of the sympathies of the world; which offered to them few of the prizes of fame, influence, or even that, which, with the true philanthropist, outweighs all other rewards-the wide love and sympathy of their fellow beings! Truly there was little in the body, neither religion, poetical ideal, nor wideHence there have been spread human interest to invite their regards. comparatively few of the most powerful and genial minds in the medical profession as these, with their insatiable demand for human sympathy,

chose the more certain paths to it. Poets have shunned it, and therefore has the poetry of the body, as lofty and as beautiful as any, never yet been adequately conceived; religious and moral philosophers have shunned it, and therefore, have its religion and morality remained unrecognised. How much has been lost by this, the body will yet make us feel.

Neither in former times nor at present has the youth even a fair choice given him, at his entrance upon life, of adopting the medical profession. His whole previous education, none of which has been concerned with physical studies, and more especially with the study of the human body, gives him a bias to mental ones, the more powerful in proportion to the abilities he has shown. Hence in the present day, if a boy distinguish himself at school, or a youth at college, medicine is the last profession either he or others think of his entering. It is completely out of the sphere of his own sympathies and associations, which are bound up in the great world of poetry, literature, religion, and morality, to which medicine is almost unknown. Do not these facts show the little reverence in which the medical profession is held? While these things are so, men may render it lip-service, saying, "Oh, medicine is a noble calling, what could be more honourable than to heal the sick and comfort the afflicted!" But with such vain words no true physician will be satisfied, knowing that the hearts of the faint praisers are in reality far from us. I have heard it said by a medical man, No one who has any money, chooses medicine as a profession," and as a general rule this is true. Few who have free choice enter it; no man of independent means takes it as the delight and recreation of his leisure hours, for the sake of study and science, and not of art and practice. Medicine is generally looked upon as a calling of a prosaic, plodding, and uninteresting, if not of a materialising and disgusting nature, which repels the man of ardent mind. Hence it is comparatively seldom entered from disinterested love or aims of a lofty character. is too often viewed by those who adopt it, as a mere art, whereby to make their bread; and in general it is chosen by men not of the highest mental culture, or of even moderate fortune.

It

Of course, there are many brilliant exceptions to this, but I speak merely of the general rule. It is true that the further they proceed in their pursuits, the more devoted becomes their love for them, for who can know any part of nature without loving it? So that there is no class of men perhaps who ultimately become more enthusiastic in their profession than medical men. From the time they enter the dissecting room, and having got over the unpleasant feelings caused by their previous prejudices, learn at every step more and more to love and admire the wondrous new world they have been admitted to, until they quit the scene of their labours, the ruling passion of love for the human body in all its ages and stages, joys and sorrows, the stronger that to them alone have its secrets and its beauties been unfolded, waxes more and more powerful in the true medical breast. But their love, intense as it often is, is by no means generally of a pure nature. So far from wishing to extend to men in general the knowledge which has been to them the source of so much enjoyment and advantage, they have done all they could to prevent others having an access to these secrets.

They have constantly discouraged all unprofessional attempts to reason