PHYSICAL EDUCATION. 731 



very cogent a jyriori reasons. If the testimony of our senses helps us 

 to select our proper food, and warns us against injurious substances, 

 have we any reason to suppose that such salutary intuitions forsake us 

 at the time of the s^reatest need in the hour of our stru2:e:le with a 

 life-endano-erino; disease ? Shall we believe that at such times our 

 sense of taste loarns us against salubrious substances ? And does it 

 not urgently warn us against ninety-nine out of a hundred "medi- 

 cines"? Shall the sick believe that an all-wise Creator has staked the 

 chances of their recovery upon the accident of their acquaintance with 

 Dr. Quack's Quinine Bitters or Puff & Co.'s Purgative Pills? Yet, is 

 it possible to mistake the analogy between the remedial theories of 

 our nostrum-mongers and the alleged moral "plan of salvation"? 

 Is not the key-note of the Semitic dogma mistrust of our natural in- 

 stincts and reliance upon abnormal remedies mummeries, mysteries, 

 and miracles ? 



Poison-mongers, physical or spiritual, will cease to be in request 

 whenever their customers begin to susjDect that this world of ours is 

 governed by laws, and not by special acts of intervention ; that sick- 

 ness can be cured only by conformity to those laws, and not by drugs 

 and prayers i. e., anti natural and supernatural remedies. To the 

 children of Xature all good things are attractive, all evil repulsive : 

 the laws of God proclaim and avenge themselves ; the Author of this 

 logically-ordered universe can never have intended that our salvation 

 should depend upon the accident of our acquaintance with the dogmas 

 of an isolated act of revelation ; and, as surely as the germ of the hid- 

 den seed-corn finds its way through night to light, the unaided in- 

 stincts of the lowliest islander would guide him safely on the path of 

 moral and physical welfare. 



These words would be truisms if Truth had not been a contraband 

 for the last eio^hteen hundred vears : To nine tenths of our Christian 

 contemporaries God's most authentic revelation is still a sealed book ; 

 and, before any reformer can hope to turn this chaos of vice, supersti- 

 tion, and quackery, into anything like a cosmos, he must convince his 

 fellow-men that the study of Nature has to supersede the worship of 

 miracles, even though that conviction should imply that the funda- 

 mental dogmas of our priest-religion are perniciously false. 



to establish the fact that disease is a restorative operation, or renovating process, and that 

 medicine has deceived us. The evidence is full and complete. It does not consist merely 

 of a few isolated cases, whose recovery might be attributed to fortuitous circumstances, 

 but it is a chain of testimony fortified by every possible circumstance. . . . All kinds and 

 grades of disease have passed under the ordeal, and all classes and characters of persons 

 have been concerned in the experiment as patients or witnesses; . . . ivhile the process of 

 infinitesimally attenuating the drugs used was carried to such a ridiculous extent that no 

 one wiU., on sober reflection^ attribzde any portion of the cure to the medicine. I claim, 

 then, that homoeopathy may be regarded as a providential scaling of the fate of old 

 medical views and practice*" (Isaac Jennings, M. D., " Medical Reform," p. 247.) 



