th thoughts. Fancies surged and thronged within.
Then God gave the soul a body, as a harp of many strings. Through it
the soul finds voice and pours forth its rich thoughts and varied
emotions.

Consider, also, how nature has ordained the body as a system of moral
registration. Nature has a record of all men's deeds, keeping her
accounts on fleshly tablets. The mind may forget, the body never. The
brain sees to it that the thoughts within do immediately dispose of
facial tissue without. Mental brightness gives facial illumination.
The right act or true thought sets its stamp of beauty in the
features; the wrong act or foul thought sets its seal of distortion.
Moral purity and sweetness refine and beautify the countenance. The
body is a show window, advertising and exhibiting the soul's stock of
goods. Nature condenses bough, bud and shrub into black coal; compacts
the rich forces of air and sun and soil into peach and pear. In the
kingdom of morals, there are people who seem to be of virtue, truth
and goodness all compact. Contrariwise, every day you will meet men
upon our streets who are solid bestiality and villainy done up in
flesh and skin. Each feature is as eloquent of rascality as an ape's
of idiocy. Experts skilled in physiognomy need no confession from
impish lips, but read the life-history from page to page written on
features "dimmed by sensuality, convulsed by passion, branded by
remorse; the body consumed with sloth and dishonored with selfish
uses; the bones full of the sins of youth, the face hideous with
secret vices, the roots dried up beneath and the branches cut off
above." It is as natural and necessary for hidden thoughts and deeds
to reveal themselves through cuticle as for root or bud in spring to
unroll themselves into sight and observation. Here and now everything
tends to obscure nature's handwriting and to veil it in mist and
disguise. But the body is God's canvas, and nature's handwriting goes
ever on. Each faculty is a brush, and with it reason thinks out the
portrait. Even the wolf may give something to the features, and also
the snake and scorpion. Soon will come an hour when men will hear not
the voice of the sirens singing praises in the ear, nor the plaudits
of men of low deeds and conscience, but an hour when men shall stand
in the presence of the all-revealing light and see themselves as they
are and review the life they have embodied and emportraited. Happy,
thrice happy, those who