452 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



"At the proposition of snch-like pastime," says Ludwig Boerne, "a 

 resurrected citizen of ancient Rome would feel like a filibuster at an 

 invitation to dive for copper coins in a duck-pond, after having chased 

 King Philip's silver fleet on the .Spanish Main." 



Not poverty makes our daily ways so trite and joyless, for the best 

 recreations are still as free as the air and the sea ; nor want of leisure, 

 for we manage to find plenty of time for humdrum ceremonies. The 

 old Egyptians turned, their funerals into holidays we celebrate our 

 holidays like funerals ; all the employments of our weekly day of rest 

 are sicklied over with a cast of superstitious fear ; and, indeed, no 

 other anachronism of our strangely complex civilization proclaims 

 more loudly the necessity of its divorce from the influence of an anti- 

 natural religion. When that religion reigned supreme, its exponents 

 openly and violently waged war upon all earthly joys ; sublunary life, 

 according to their doctrine, was a state of probation for testing a 

 man's power of self-denial ; earth was the devil's own, and delight in 

 its pleasures an insult to the jealous ruler of a higher sphere. They 

 believed that God delights in the self-abasement and mortification of 

 his creatures, and hoped to gain his favor by afilicting themselves in 

 every possible way by voluntary seclusion, fasts, vigils, the wearing 

 of dingy garments, and abstinence from every physical pleasure. Fail- 

 ing to enamor mankind with their doleful heaven, they revenged 

 themselves by depriving them of their earthly joys. In hopes of mak- 

 ing the hereafter more attractive, they made life as repulsive as pos- 

 sible ; kill-joys and persecutors were the active heroes of those times ; 

 ascetics and self-tormentors their passive exemplars. Virtue and joy- 

 lessness became synonyms ; men aspiring to superior merit exchanged 

 the glories of the sunny earth for the misery of a gloomy convent ; a 

 *' Man of Sorrows " became a type of moral perfection, an instrument 

 of torture, the trade-mark of the new religion. Kosmos i. e., beauty 

 and harmony was the oldest Grecian term for God's wonderful world ; 

 a " vale of tears " the favorite Christian epithet. A symposium of 

 festive heroes was exchanged for a conventicle of whining penitents, 

 Olympus for a charnel-house, the festival of the seasons for the eccle- 

 siastic sabbath : there, a merry multitude, joining in dances and heroic 

 games, inspired by the rapture of emulation, the joy of exuberant 

 health and the beauty of earth till their happiness overflowed in 

 anthems of praise to the bounteous gods ; here, a cowed and wretched 

 assemblage, listening with groans to the denunciations of a Nature- 

 hating fanatic. And that hideous superstition founds its claim to our 

 gratitude on its merit of having suppressed a few profligate pastimes 

 in aiming its death-blows at all earthly joys whatever ; as if the 

 crushing of a few poison-plants could atone for the attempt to turn a 

 fertile continent into a sand- waste ! The attempt, I say, for I do not 

 believe that either the axe or the cross will for ever mar the beauty of 

 our Mother Earth ; the devastated woodlands of the East will ulti- 



