brain? Certainly, this is impossible, whatever mistaken moral views have led some to suppose. Therefore provision for the one is as lofty, and moreover, just as difficult an endeavour as for the other; and indeed the only true method of attaining the highest development of man, is by equal regard and attention to the interests of both.

The man who is only conversant with spiritual reasoning and mental phenomena, who has confined his attention to the region of mind, and is ignorant of the body with its infinitely complex states of health and disease, is incapable of a true and comprehensive view of man-in the same way is he, who knows only the physical side, equally imperfect. In every act, every thought, every relation of man, there are a double train of forces at work, and he who attends only to the one is not fitted to reason on the whole result. In every act presented to the eye of the moralist, there is a physical line of causation, equally important, equally difficult to unravel, which must be taken into account, before he can be said to reason on man, as a whole being, at all. Therefore, since the moralist and the physicist have hitherto been separated in the world's history, we possess no comprehensive or true views of man, and our reasonings both in morals and in medicine will all need complete revision by minds equally conversant with body and mind, and their several phenomena of health and disease; and ready to assign to each their due importance, unbiased by partiality for either.

There has not yet lived a man, who has done this for the world; who has brought to bear on the problem of life a brain equally trained in spiritual and bodily experience, educated equally in the phenomena of the mental and material universe. Unstirred by the unhappy party distinctions of spiritualism and materialism, seeking instruction on all parts and sides of nature, omitting equal reverence to none, would not he show more fully than our fathers have done, his duty and devotion to man and to nature?

But physical religion does not leave it to us as a matter of choice, whether we will study the laws of our body or not; it enjoins their study on all men as a duty, second in importance to none.

If you do not wish to live a physically virtuous, that is, a healthy life, you are an immoral being; if you do, there is but one way to it; study the laws of health and obey them. Physical virtue is as iofty an aim for man as moral virtue, and no man can be called good, who does not combine and aspire equally after both. To break a physical law is just as culpable as to break a moral one, and therefore all physical diseases must be regarded as a sign of sin, and as little in the one case as in the other, can ignorance be received as an excuse. No man whose body is diseased whether hereditarily or individually, can be called a virtuous being.

All moral and all physical excellencies may be mutually resolved into each other, for a noble mind or a good or true spirit may be just as fairly regarded as a noble and true brain, and all physical good may equally be traced to a moral one. Thus, by following the trains of thought of spiritualist and materialist, we will be able, equally legitimately, at one time to resolve all things into spirit, at another all into matter.

Beauty of form, and physical strength and activity, as well as health,

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 ar 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 I 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 al error, physical and moral.”

I have endeavoured elsewhere, in the treatise on the sexual organs, t 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, els will their consequent ruin involve the ruin of the whole being. Befor the calm eye of rature, all flimsy veils of morbid modesty, shame, an

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

thos 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 specia! 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 tendencies of the science, be totally uprooted. It is rarely that we see in 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 widespread human interest to invite their regards. Hence there have been comparatively few of the most powerful and genial minds in the medical profession as these, with their insatiable demand for human sympathy,