Page:Letters on the Human Body (John Clowes).djvu/86

66 for this additional proof of His adorable benevolence.

But, alas! my good Friend, we live, it is to be feared, in an age when the pleasure, resulting from the exercise of the bodily organs of taste, has acquired a terrible and destructive ascendancy over the real benefits and uses, both natural and spiritual, both temporal and eternal, which they were intended to confer and yield. For how few, at this day, in that exercise, look through the pleasure to the use and benefit! How many also, by an inordinate indulgence in the pleasure, plunge both body and soul into disorder, by destroying that health of both which every bodily sense was designed to promote and secure! I should be sorry either to form or to pronounce a hasty and severe judgment on the temper and spirit of any age, or any people, but surely it is impossible not to see, that animal gratification, at this day, is the object principally regarded in the use of our meats and drinks; and that thus the organs of bodily taste—instead of opening the doors, as they were meant to do, to the higher organs of intellectual and spiritual taste, and to the higher delights which these latter organs have a tendency to produce—only shut them more closely against both the organs and their delights.