Page:Asenath Nicholson - Nature's Own Book.pdf/12

8 which looks out upon its native air, and longs to soar aloft into the pure ether it was once destined to breathe ; but wires and bars confine it to its few inches of space for ever.

And what can be done? Like people, like priest, we are all in one jumbled mass, enveloped in thick darkness, groping our way together, and know not at what we stumble. If a few scintillations of light break upon us, they are like the lightning, gleaming upon the blackened cloud in the midnight storm, serving only to "make darkness visible." If an appeal be made to the conscience of the Christian, he very gravely tells you, these things are the "good creatures of God," given for our comfort, and not to be despised. If you talk to the physician, he pertly tells you he has studied all these things, and must know—(while you may think yourself fortunate if he know the true properties of bread.) If you talk to the mother, she tells you that the "Doctor says so;" and the sum total is, eat and drink, make the body a receptacle of dead carcases, and the contents of the confectionary and druggist shop; while the puny, half-starved intellect, is forced to feed on the avails, with half-grown, mutilated thoughts, steeped and fumed in all the abominables of earth, seas, and skies. But shall the mammoth ignorance, and the glutton appetite, always govern us? Shall men and women never learn the import of obtaining the mastery, by being "temperate in all things?" of "keeping their