Page:A Few Hours in a Far Off Age.djvu/60

Rh This will teach you how balefully lasting is the effect of ignorance. They purposely distorted their bodies from laudable desire to become graceful and beautiful. (The girls glance scornfully at the nineteenth century fashionables.) It was then the custom all over the earth to try and beautify nature by deformity. To effect this, some slit their lips, others elongated the head by pressure, seamed the skin, injured the nose, hung jewels in it, crippled the feet, and much besides! The most civilized changed the natural appearance of the human body by pressing the ribs into the interior, altered the shape of their feet, painted in red and black; and, by attaching metal weights to them, lengthened their ears, as if in deference to some of their four-legged relatives. All this seems highly reprehensible to you, as I read by that unwelcome glance of scorn. Now ask yourselves what would be your own beauty, or that of your children's, if scorn should become a feeling in you—and for whom? For the early beings of our species, who, in crudeness of thought bore all that enervating suffering in daily performance of what they had been taught was their duty! Think, and you will see all these past errors arose from an intuition of a higher state of beauty, and they only acted in accordance with their small understandings. They had not learnt that mind—the mind increasing from era to era—alone can bring the really beautiful. They had little but ignorant vanity to guide them. The unfortunate result of which is this day to raise a falsely happy hope in my dear students that all the wonderful truth we are studying should prove to be a mistake!—Accompany me to the torture department, I will there show you the wretched implement with which those poor women so caricatured the human form."