228 THE HUMAN HEART. 



his vitals ; and intellect is smelted and raised, when it admits the 

 meaning of the better longings which its own experience knows. 



Hence a reason for the pleasure connected with the assimilative 

 function. For it is a law that pleasure is given to organism accord- 

 ing to the uses performed, and especially according to the ulterior 

 uses associated with the material organs. Thus the parts whose 

 functions are mercy-like, have bodily pleasures conferred upon them 

 as like as corporeal feeling can be, to the satisfaction and blessed- 

 ness of mercy. Hence we do right to thank God before and after 

 meals for all His mercies. The organs, however, thus furnished 

 with rivers of pleasure from this source, are capable of abuse, or 

 stimulation without a true end. For if pleasures are assigned them 

 for mercy's sake or for just purposes, and man finds the pleasures 

 out, he may choose to enjoy the latter apart from the purposes; as 

 is sufficiently well known : but in that case the first conditions are 

 absent, and the pleasures are verging to retributions. The case of 

 the generative organs is parallel : for the sake of the heart's love 

 which has intercourse with them, and the rich end that they carry, 

 they are endowed with supreme incentives of bodily delights. And 

 in general every part is gifted with these, first according to the ne- 

 cessity of its functions in the body, and secondly according to its 

 privilege of representing, or being similar to, functions of the soul 

 which are delightful self-evidently, or in the order and justice of 

 God. 



The body itself is a group of sensories. As the eye is a bodily 

 sensorium of light, and has intercourse with intelligence ; and as the 

 heart is a bodily sensorium of blood, and has intercourse with the 

 hearty sentiments felt for our greater blood, which is human kind ; 

 and as the bowels are a sensory of our wants from below, and of 

 nature's longings to be raised into blood, and as they have inter- 

 course with gracious sensibilities — so every other part is a feeling of 

 its own objects; and if we knew those objects in common sense, 

 would be found to have intercourse with some principles in the soul 

 that would explain its pleasures, and give the veriest motive of its 

 functions. The liver, for example, the gruff king of the belly, as 

 the stomach is the queen, is the seat and sensory of a severer pro- 

 cess of assimilation, as of judgment added to mercy, or justice to 



