MODERN TROGLODYTES. 45 



fact lire of glass, they never used it to obstruct their windows ; in all 

 the temples, palaces, and dwelling-houses of antiquity, the apertures 

 provided to admit light admitted fresh air at the same time. The 

 tuguria of the Roman peasants were simply arbors ; and the domiciles 

 of our hardy Saxon forefathers resembled the log-cabins of Eastern 

 Tennessee rough-hewed logs laid crosswise, with liberal interspaces 

 that serve as windows on all sides except that opposed to the prevail- 

 ing wind, north or northwest, where they are stopped with moss. 



Men had to be utterly divorced from Nature before they could pre- 

 fer the hot stench of their dungeons to the cool breezes of heaven, but 

 our system of ethics has proved itself equal to the task. For eighteen 

 hundred years our spiritual guides have taught us to consider Nature 

 and everything natural as wholly evil, and to substitute therefor the 

 supernatural and the artificial, in physical as well as in moral life. The 

 natural sciences of antiquity they superseded by the artificial dogma, 

 suppressed investigation to foster belief, substituted love of death for 

 love of life, celibacy for marriage, the twilight of their gloomy vaults 

 for the sunshine of the Chaldean mountains, and their dull religious 

 " exercises " for the joyous games of the palwstra. This system taught 

 us that the love of sport and out-door pastimes is wicked, that the flesh 

 has to be " crucified " and the buoyant spirit crushed to make it accept- 

 able to God ; that all earthly joys are vain ; nay, that the earth itself is 

 a vale of tears, and the heaven of the Hebrew fanatic our proper home. 



"The monastic recluse," says Ulric Hutten, "closes every aper- 

 ture of his narrow cell on his return from midnight prayers, for fear 

 that the nightingale's song might intrude upon his devotions, or the 

 morning wind visit him with the fragrance and the greeting of the 

 hill forests, and divert his mind to earthly things from things spiritual. 

 He dreads a devil wherever the Nature-loving Greeks worshiped a 

 god." These narrow cells, the dungeons of the Inquisition, the 

 churches whose painted windows excluded not only the air but the 

 very light of heaven, the prison-like convent-schools and the general 

 control exercised by the Christian priests over the domestic life of their 

 parishioners, laid the foundation of a habit which, like everything un- 

 healthy, became a second nature in old habitues, and gave birth to that 

 brood of absurd chimeras which, under the name of " salutary precau- 

 tions," inspire us with fear of the night air, of " cold draughts," of 

 morning dews, and of March winds. 



I have often thought that mistrust in our instincts would be the 

 most appropriate word for a root of evil which has produced a more 

 - plentiful crop of misery in modern times than all the sensual excesses 

 and ferocious passions of our forefathers taken together. What a dis- 

 mal ignorance of the symbolic language by which Nature expresses her 

 will is implied by the idea that the sweet breath of the summer night 

 which addresses itself to our senses like a blessing from heaven could 

 be injurious ! Yet nine out of ten guests in an overheated ballroom 



