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LECTURE III.

PHYSIOLOGICAL VICES AND VIRTUES.

THE web of our present life is made of mingled substances. Shadows and realities, great and small threads, are marvellously wrought into one fabric. In these we are clad. Our internal state is manifested by means of our habiliments; not through their thread-bare poverty, but in their quantity and disposition upon us. For so is the tree judged by the arrangement of its boughs; or the value of a house or an arch, by the quality and construction of its minor material.

Our happiness or misery comes no less through the avenues of domestic habits than through the great highways of social and national existence. A wrong word uttered will jar the home for hours; the soul for days, perhaps for years. The Universe is made of fine, invisible particles; and even these embosom atoms finer still. So our soul's minutest feeling has another within it, exposed, perhaps, to a trivial influence, but always capable of rousing the entire mind to emotions and memories of either pain or pleasure. The soul requires a healthy body; not only so, but the body must live in strictest reference to the elevation and progression of the soul; else both will fall into the ditch, and the multitude will heed them not.

In little things, therefore, we are admonished to be guided by the law of uses. All our means must have strict reference to our ends. Those ends are only good which are high and worthy the soul of an angel; for every man, though buried in the sinks of sin, is an angel still, and will ultimately so declare

himself; because the Universe is so constructed, that roughest earth will bring forth fruit, and above the barbed and thorny stem, a flower will unfold. But good fruit and beautiful flowers come from good and beautiful conditions.

When I employ the term "evil," let no reader suppose me a believer in the existence of any such thing in the absolute. It will do for a Pagan to believe in the creation or the toleration of Evil by the Supreme Being; but to the experiences and consequent enlightenment of a civilized mind, this superstition is altogether too antiquated and too derogatory to the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of that Being whom we call Deity. On the contrary, kind reader, I believe in no absolute principle of Evil; only in the misapplication of good laws, and naturally good substances to the affairs and functions of life. For instance: who is enough benighted to suppose that the effect of certain elements known as Fire, is evil, because, when it is placed in wrong relations to our property, it burns our houses, or when we place our bodies in false relations to it, that it then destroys our flesh and consumes us? Evil, as a principle, is not in existence. But through the instrumentality of our ignorance, or by the powerful impulsions of our passional forces, we may bring good natural laws and pure substances into false relations to the laws and requirements of our organisms, and thus develop pain, disease, discords, dissatisfactions, dissolution, and death. Having defined my impressions of "evil" and "sin," and "violation," and the true Philosophy of Reform, I shall now proceed.

It is melancholy to look back upon the smouldering ruins of a once proud and noble city; or upon the battle-field, strewn with human beings, trampled down by the war-horse with despair and death visible everywhere. Man's skill in time again can restore the city to its primitive glory, can rear again its beautiful columns, can cleanse its streets of all corruption, and

old conditions may become new. The battle-field strewn with the dead, the steel yet in their vitals, can be renovated and cleansed of the foul disaster. But it is a greater sorrow to behold the downfall and degradation of the son of man -to see health, hopes, home, honor, prostrated by the ruthless hand of some subtle habit-to see the noble form of man, encompassing a still nobler power, polluted, outraged, insulted! How many eyes have flowed with regretful tears, how many souls have been filled with a great grief, in consequence of crimes committed in early youth against the laws and functions of the entire economy. It is easier to rear the fallen columns of a city, it is far less difficult to cleanse the battle-field, than to restore the prostrate powers and pristine purity of poor human nature.

The greatness of a nation depends upon its goodness; its glory, upon successful efforts for the fraternization and elevation of humanity. The same is true of individual man. His nobility and refinement depend upon his integrity and purity. But it is one thing to preach the philosophy, the necessity, and benefits, of goodness, and quite another to practise what we intellectually comprehend. This is true, because knowledge and volition are not always harnessed together. Man is not only a Power, but a Circumstance. While he acts apparently as from himself, he, in truth, acts only as contiguous influences suggest. Like the bird in the air or fish in the sea, man has his circle of comparative free agency, a sphere of self-preservation and selfcontrol. And still like the fish and the bird, he depends upon the existence of the elements in which he moves; and not less upon the propitiousness of relative confluent circumstances for his subsistence and development and direction. Therefore we do not condemn the erring; they are self-judged and loaded with penalties.

Theoretical doctors and book-made divines are exceedingly fond of delivering courses of "lectures to young men," and after

ward "to young ladies." But extraordinary precautions are observed lest something should be immodestly uttered-lest prudish mothers and maiden aunts should take offence and reduce the size of the audience. From many considerations and causes, unworthy of the man of science and the philanthropist not less, the world has been, generation after generation, deprived of the most essential parts of human knowledge. But the hour has at last arrived for rending the veil of Ignorance! There is an ocean of crime and pollution, underneath the fashion and hypocritical modesty of civilized society, surging its mighty tides against the constitutions of the young, to an extent almost beyond belief or delineation. The curtain shall be rolled up notwithstanding. Parents, guardians, brothers, sisters, strangers, lovers: you are admonished to gaze upon the scene! Humanity demands the health of her children. The vices and secret crimes of the young must be fully and truthfully exposed to public apprehension. Without such knowledge of the interior abominations of civilization, there is no security against the greatest calamity which can befall a nation-youthful depravity, constitutional weakness, hereditary licentiousness, incompatible marriages, insanity, imbecility, idiocy.

Philosophical minds and true philanthropists are never chained to the rack of superficial modesty. They seek and expose the hidden sources of misery; they strive to understand and remove their causes. The subject now before us may be considered strictly a question of physiology; to which are legitimately attached the subjects of health, chastity, virtue, happiness, and spiritual nobility of character. In probing the secret vices of society to their very core, I have but one object in view-viz.: the prevention of those calamities which afflict the human race. It is a subject which concerns not merely the young; the aged have great interest in the development and excellency of coming hosts. It is a question of

fearful import not to young men only; for the yet unmarried woman must find her companion on that side of the race. It is a theme of wondrous magnitude not merely for this day and this nation; the weal or wo of countless millions, yet unborn, rests upon the foundation of the present.

The Harmonial Dispensation, in contradistinction to all past. epochs in the progressive development of human kind, is destined to remove and prevent crime through Knowledge, first; then, through Wisdom; and, third, through favorable social circumstances. Arbitrary laws, enforced through fear, have a restraining, not a reforming effect, upon man. The fear of hell sometimes keeps "the wretch in order;" but such is never sure to work a reformation in him. He is a tiger in chains—all the worse for the arbitrary restraint-waiting merely for the fear to subside in order to act his misdirected nature out. The victim or the convert of fear never grows great and beautiful. He is petrified; the mind is cramped; his affections press back upon their fountain source; and the inward nature in due time exhibits much deformity.

Divines represent to young minds the "Terrors of the Lord;" the retributive justice of an offended implacable deity, and the unearthly punishments that follow crime-unless they believe in the saving power which is said to lurk mysteriously in the blood of a certain truth-loving Martyr. But the American young, descendants of Yankee merchants, with speculation in their eyes, capable of calculating "risks" and "chances,” indulge themselves in certain physiologic vices with the unreasonable hope of escaping all important sequences by a deathbed repentance. False doctrines lead to false results. Arbitrary and procrastinated punishments, in theory, lay the foundation of much deformity in practice. Natural and immediate punishment for crime, on the contrary, is the only theory of human salvation from crime and its results. Its practice leads

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