ds have taught that the body itself is evil and the seat of sin;
that its instincts must be crushed and its appetites repressed and
eradicated; and that it is only so far as you trample your animal nature
under foot that you can rise to be a saint. "Brute," "blind," "dead,"
have been the epithets bestowed on matter, which is a ceaseless play of
living forces that rest not day nor night. To look down on the material
pleasures with suspicion, to fly contact with the rude world and lose
one's self in the unembodied splendors of the spiritual, to save souls
rather than men and women, to preach abstract doctrines rather than
grapple with hideous concrete problems--this has been the tendency of
the religious spirit in all ages, a tendency of which positive
asceticism, with its mortification of the body, and its ideal of
virginity, and marriage regarded as more or less a concession to the
flesh, is only an exaggeration.

On the other hand, in disgust at the mutilation of human nature and
under pretext of its consummation, has arisen the "fleshly school,"
whose maxim is "obedience to Nature,"--leaving undefined what nature,
the nature of the swine or the nature of the man,--which holds that
every natural instinct ought to be obeyed, which takes the agreeable as
the test of the right, and which goes in for the "healthy animal" with
enlightened self-interest as the safeguard against excesses.

Alas! the results are no happier. The healthy animal treads under his
feet the helpless and the weak, who suffer that he may grow fat and
kick. The attractive warmth and color and richness are found to be but
rottenness and decay.

When, dissatisfied with the teaching of men, one turns to the great
world at large, to see whether some practical instinct may not have
guided men to a right adjustment, one's first feeling is one of dismay
at the spectacle presented. The bodily instincts and appetites that seem
to work aright in the animal world, in man seem fatally overloaded, and,
instead of hitting the mark, explode with disaster and death at the
outset.

Let us now turn to the teaching of Christ, and see whether it does not
explain the deep disorder of the animal instincts in the world of man,
and while saving us on the one hand from the self-mutilation of
asceticism, and from the swinishness of the fleshly school on the
other, whether it does not embrace the truth that is in both and teach
us how to correlate the material and the spirit