can feel the
gratefulness of the blazing fire, taste the sweetness of an orange,
experience the aesthetic delights of a picture, recall the events in
the careers of the men the artist has delineated, recognize the
entrance of a group of friends, out of the confusion of tongues lead
forth a voice not heard for years, thrill with elation at the
unexpected meeting! The very mention of such an instrument, combining
audiphone, telephone, phonograph, organ, loom, and many other
mechanisms yet to be invented, seems like some tale from the "Arabian
Nights." Yet the body and brain make up such a wondrous mental loom,
weaving thought-textures called conversations, poems, orations, making
the creations of a Jacquard loom mere child's play. The body is like a
vast mental depot with lines running out into all the world.
Everything outside has a desk inside where it transacts its special
line of business. There is a visual desk where sunbeams make up their
accounts; an aural desk where melodies conduct their negotiations; a
memory desk where actions and motives are recorded; a logical desk
where reasons and arguments are received and filed. Truly God hath
woven the bones and sinews that fence the soul about into a mechanism
"fearfully and wonderfully made."

To-day science is writing for us the story of the ascent of the body.
Scholars perceive that matter has fulfilled its mission now that dust
stands erect, throbbing in a thinking brain, and beating in a glowing
heart. Ours is a world wherein God hath ordained that acorns should go
on toward oaks, huts become houses, tents temples, babes men, and the
generations journey on to that sublime event "toward which the whole
creation moves." In this long upward march science declares the human
body has had its place. Professor Drummond, famed for his Christian
faith, in his recent volume tells us that man's body brings forward
and combines in itself all the excellencies of the whole lower animal
creation. As the locomotive of to-day contains the engine of Watt and
the improvements of all succeeding inventors; as the Hoe
printing-press contains the rude hand-machine of Guttenberg and the
best features of all the machines that followed it; so the human body
contains the special gift of all earlier and lower forms of animal
life. In making a reaper the machinist does not begin with the sickle,
and then unite the hook with the scythe, afterward joining thereto the
rude reaper and so move on