48 PROLEGOMENON. 



fection of his physical nature now unknown and beyond 

 belief or aspiration. 



Is the present squalor or walking catalogue of disease and 

 infirmity to be superseded by a more perfect incarnation 

 of the soul ? is the present loafer the u eat-all, do-nothing" 

 to be succeeded by the normal and sound man, with erect 

 body and determined will, whose works and labors shall 

 shine as the acts of apostles and demigods of history ? 



There are hopes for humanity which have taken diiferent 

 forms in prophetic souls, in different regenerators of the 

 race, divine vaticinations of the advent of the new and 

 more perfect splendor, vague articulations of the voice of 

 the Destinies; all of which would herald the dawn of a new 

 world and realize the prayer for the new and perfect man 

 to be born. It is clearly apparent that the man dimly fore- 

 shadowed is the perfect physical man, who must also be the 

 perfect metaphysical man; for "to FORM man is predicated of 

 the external man when made alive, or when he becomes 

 celestial; and as the natural forms of things, both animate 

 and inanimate, are representative of spiritual and celestial 

 things in the Lord's kingdom," so the perfect natural man 

 from divine correspondence will become the perfect super- 

 natural man. 



What wisdom is in the fable of Antaeus I He was a 

 Giant whose strength was invincible as long as his body 

 was the perfect culmination of the somatic forces derived 

 from Nature, or, as the fable deposeth, from his mother Earthy 

 so long as he remained in contact with his mother. Now, 

 man is that giant Antaeus bereaved of his strength and 

 invincibility by the vicious habitudes of civilized life. He 

 congregates in towns and cities, builds for himself an arti- 

 ficial and morbid world, lives in marble palaces, breathes 

 the mephitic gases and pestilential emanations inseparable 

 from all concentrated accumulations of animal life, with 

 their necessary accompaniments of gutters, sinks, and 

 sewers, inhaling perpetually the dead and effete air of heat- 

 ing-furnaces, mingled with reekings of rum and tobacco; 



