ANTAEUS THE GIANT. 577 



Whole libraries are made of books that scarcely serve to 

 catalogue man's infirmities ; temples of learning are erected, 

 and proud professorships are endowed, whose whole func- 

 tion it is to recite the bill-of-fare for the angel of death, and 

 repeat the list of wines of the grave. The best medical 

 treatise has been styled "a Dissertation upon Death," and 

 the best physician a "blind man with a club." This mourn- 

 ful pessimism is a cloud of that gloomy despondency which 

 characterizes the hour, giving a science without faith or 

 worship, a philosophy without hope or holiness, and a reli- 

 gion without love or charity. But "man's misery is his gran- 

 deur in disguise, and discontent is immortality." 



If he is the "entire image or likeness of the world," whence 

 have shrunk the rivers of his life ? whence have withered 

 away his verdant savannas ? Why do salt deserts and arid 

 mountains till the horizon? Is he a broken-hearted god, 

 mourning with infinite grief over the solitude of a bank- 

 rupt and dead Universe ? One green oasis of a living soul 

 in long thousands of years, one spot of flowers in weary, 

 endless leagues, and he rolls a pathless waste ! Is the world 

 a school-house for the education of angels, or a den of tor- 

 ment for the excruciation of demons ? Many of the dogmas 

 of fatalism and despair of the past make it a howling wil- 



otliers, and to alleviate the effects of all. Disease is much more fre- 

 quently the result of our own conduct than the direct infliction of 

 Providence, the necessary result of climate, or other external in- 

 fluence." BE ALE. 



Different philosophers have given different origins of the evil called 

 disease : first, it comes from man himself as a consequence of the in- 

 fraction of the laws of his physical and moral constitution ; again, 

 the devil has been made the inventor of disease; or the genius of ac- 

 cident has been supposed to preside over this department ; and it has 

 also been impiously suggested that God himself is the author of this, 

 as of all other evil. We need go no further than man, and the won- 

 derful laws of his organization, for this whole list of horrors : dis- 

 eases are the invariable consequents of the violation of the laws of 

 his body, the laws of his soul, and are "schoolmasters' rods" for 

 the reformation and education of both soul and body. 



49 



