238 
WALDEN. 
come. What avails it that you are Christian, if you 
are not purer than the heathen, if you deny yourself no 
more, if you are not more religious ? I know of many 
systems of religion esteemed heathenish whose precepts 
fill the reader with shame, and provoke him to new en¬ 
deavors, though it be to the performance of rites merely. 
I hesitate to say these things, but it is not because of 
the subject,—-I care not how obscene my words are,— 
but because I cannot speak of them without betraying 
my impurity. We discourse freely without shame of 
one form of sensuality, and are silent about another. 
We are so degraded that we cannot speak simply of the 
necessary functions of human nature. In earlier ages, 
in some countries, every function was reverently spoken 
of and regulated by law. Nothing was too trivial for 
the Hindoo lawgiver, however offensive it may be to 
modern taste. He teaches how to eat, drink, cohabit, 
void excrement and urine, and the like, elevating what 
is mean, and does not falsely excuse himself by calling 
these things trifles. 
Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, 
to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor 
can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are 
all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own 
flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at 
once to refine a man’s features, any meanness or sen¬ 
suality to imbrute them. 
John Farmer sat at his door one September evening, 
after a hard day’s work, his mind still running on his 
labor more or less. Having bathed he sat down to rec¬ 
reate his intellectual man. It was a rather cool even¬ 
ing, and some of his neighbors were apprehending a 
frost. He had not attended to the train of his thoughts 
