at
one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another. If you would be
chaste, you must be temperate. What is chastity? How shall a man know if
he is chaste? He shall not know it. We have heard of this virtue, but
we know not what it is. We speak conformably to the rumor which we have
heard. From exertion come wisdom and purity; from sloth ignorance and
sensuality. In the student sensuality is a sluggish habit of mind. An
unclean person is universally a slothful one, one who sits by a stove,
whom the sun shines on prostrate, who reposes without being fatigued. If
you would avoid uncleanness, and all the sins, work earnestly, though it
be at cleaning a stable. Nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be
overcome. 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 endeavors,
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 sensuality 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 re-create his intellectual man. It was a rather cool
evening, and some of his neighbors were apprehending a frost. He had
not attended to the train of his thoughts long when he heard some