mention of which humanity revolts,
and dainty delicacy living in the next street, stops her ears, and lisps
'I don't believe it!' Breathe the polluted air, foul with every impurity
that is poisonous to health and life; and have every sense, conferred
upon our race for its delight and happiness, offended, sickened and
disgusted, and made a channel by which misery and death alone can enter.
Vainly attempt to think of any simple plant, or flower, or wholesome
weed, that, set in this foetid bed, could have its natural growth,
or put its little leaves off to the sun as GOD designed it. And then,
calling up some ghastly child, with stunted form and wicked face, hold
forth on its unnatural sinfulness, and lament its being, so early, far
away from Heaven--but think a little of its having been conceived, and
born and bred, in Hell!

Those who study the physical sciences, and bring them to bear upon the
health of Man, tell us that if the noxious particles that rise from
vitiated air were palpable to the sight, we should see them lowering in
a dense black cloud above such haunts, and rolling slowly on to corrupt
the better portions of a town. But if the moral pestilence that rises
with them, and in the eternal laws of our Nature, is inseparable from
them, could be made discernible too, how terrible the revelation! Then
should we see depravity, impiety, drunkenness, theft, murder, and a long
train of nameless sins against the natural affections and repulsions of
mankind, overhanging the devoted spots, and creeping on, to blight the
innocent and spread contagion among the pure. Then should we see how the
same poisoned fountains that flow into our hospitals and lazar-houses,
inundate the jails, and make the convict-ships swim deep, and roll
across the seas, and over-run vast continents with crime. Then should
we stand appalled to know, that where we generate disease to strike our
children down and entail itself on unborn generations, there also we
breed, by the same certain process, infancy that knows no innocence,
youth without modesty or shame, maturity that is mature in nothing but
in suffering and guilt, blasted old age that is a scandal on the form we
bear, unnatural humanity! When we shall gather grapes from thorns, and
figs from thistles; when fields of grain shall spring up from the
offal in the bye-ways of our wicked cities, and roses bloom in the fat
churchyards that they cherish; then we may look for natural humanity,
and