674 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



aspirations of the soul. It was held to be the favorite province of the 

 devil, who, having intrenched himself there, lay in wait to entice or 

 to betray to sin ; the wiles of Satan and the lusts of the flesh were 

 spoken of in the same breath, as in the service of the English Church 

 prayer is made for " whatsoever has been decayed by the fraud and 

 malice of the devil, or by his own carnal will and frailness " ; and all 

 men are taught to look forward to the time when " he shall change 

 this vile body and make it like unto his glorious body." It was the 

 extreme but logical outcome of this manner of despising the body to 

 subject it to all the penances, and to treat it with all the rigor, of the 

 most rigid asceticism to neglect it, to starve it, to scourge it, to mor- 

 tify it in every possible way. One holy ascetic would never wash 

 himself, or cut his toe-nails, or wipe his nose ; another suffered mag- 

 gots to burrow unchecked into the neglected ulcers of his emaciated 

 body ; others, like St. Francis, stripped themselves naked and appeared 

 in public without clothes. St. Macarius threw away his clothes and 

 remained naked for six months in a marsh, exposed to the bite of 

 every insect ; St. Simeon Stylites spent thirty years on the top of a 

 column which had been gradually raised to a height of sixty feet, 

 spending a great part of his time in bending his meager body suc- 

 cessively with his head toward his feet, and so industriously that a 

 curious spectator, after counting twelve hundred and forty-four 

 repetitions, desisted counting from weariness. And for these things 

 these insanities of conduct may we not call them ? they were ac- 

 counted most holy, and received the honors of saintship. Contrast 

 this unworthy view of the body with that which the ancient Greeks 

 took of it. They found no other object in nature which satisfied so 

 well their sense of proportion and manly strength, of attractive grace 

 and beauty ; and their reproductions of it in marble we preserve now 

 as priceless treasures of art, albeit we still babble the despicable doc- 

 trine of contempt of it. The more strange, since it is a matter of 

 sober scientific truth that the human body is the highest and most 

 wonderful work in nature, the last and best achievement of her crea- 

 tive skill ; it is a most complex and admirably constructed organism, 

 "fearfully and wonderfully made," which contains, as it were in a 

 microcosm, all the ingenuity and harmony and beauty of the macro- 

 cosm. And it is this supreme product of evolution that fanatics have 

 gained the honor of saintship by disfiguring and torturing ! 



These, then, are two great reasons of the repugnance which is felt 

 to materialism, namely, the notion that it is destructive of the hope of 

 a resurrection, and the contempt of the body which has been incul- 

 cated as a religious duty. And yet on these very points materialism 

 seems fitted to teach the spiritualist lessons of humility and reverence, 

 for it teaches him, in the first place, not to despise and call unclean 

 the last and best work of his Creator's hand ; and, secondly, not im- 

 piously to circumscribe supernatural power by the narrow limits of 



