the lower jaw of
a hog, with white and sound teeth and tusks, which suggested that
there was an animal health and vigor distinct from the spiritual. This
creature succeeded by other means than temperance and purity. "That
in which men differ from brute beasts," says Mencius, "is a thing very
inconsiderable; the common herd lose it very soon; superior men preserve
it carefully." Who knows what sort of life would result if we had
attained to purity? If I knew so wise a man as could teach me purity I
would go to seek him forthwith. "A command over our passions, and over
the external senses of the body, and good acts, are declared by the Ved
to be indispensable in the mind's approximation to God." Yet the spirit
can for the time pervade and control every member and function of the
body, and transmute what in form is the grossest sensuality into
purity and devotion. The generative energy, which, when we are loose,
dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates
and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called
Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which
succeed it. Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is
open. By turns our purity inspires and our impurity casts us down. He is
blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him day by day,
and the divine being established. Perhaps there is none but has cause
for shame on account of the inferior and brutish nature to which he
is allied. I fear that we are such gods or demigods only as fauns and
satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the creatures of appetite, and
that, to some extent, our very life is our disgrace.--

"How happy's he who hath due place assigned
To his beasts and disafforested his mind!
.......
Can use this horse, goat, wolf, and ev'ry beast,
And is not ass himself to all the rest!
Else man not only is the herd of swine,
But he's those devils too which did incline
Them to a headlong rage, and made them worse."

All sensuality is one, though it takes many forms; all purity is one. It
is the same whether a man eat, or drink, or cohabit, or sleep sensually.
They are but one appetite, and we only need to see a person do any one
of these things to know how great a sensualist he is. The impure can
neither stand nor sit with purity. When the reptile is attacked