Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/692

 aspirations of the soul. It was held to be the favorite province of the devil, who, having intrenched himself there, lay in wait to entice or to betray to sin; the wiles of Satan and the lusts of the flesh were spoken of in the same breath, as in the service of the English Church prayer is made for "whatsoever has been decayed by the fraud and malice of the devil, or by his own carnal will and frailness"; and all men are taught to look forward to the time when "he shall change this vile body and make it like unto his glorious body." It was the extreme but logical outcome of this manner of despising the body to subject it to all the penances, and to treat it with all the rigor, of the most rigid asceticism—to neglect it, to starve it, to scourge it, to mortify it in every possible way. One holy ascetic would never wash himself, or cut his toe-nails, or wipe his nose; another suffered maggots to burrow unchecked into the neglected ulcers of his emaciated body; others, like St. Francis, stripped themselves naked and appeared in public without clothes. St. Macarius threw away his clothes and remained naked for six months in a marsh, exposed to the bite of every insect; St. Simeon Stylites spent thirty years on the top of a column which had been gradually raised to a height of sixty feet, spending a great part of his time in bending his meager body successively with his head toward his feet, and so industriously that a curious spectator, after counting twelve hundred and forty-four repetitions, desisted counting from weariness. And for these things—these insanities of conduct may we not call them?—they were accounted most holy, and received the honors of saintship. Contrast this unworthy view of the body with that which the ancient Greeks took of it. They found no other object in nature which satisfied so well their sense of proportion and manly strength, of attractive grace and beauty; and their reproductions of it in marble we preserve now as priceless treasures of art, albeit we still babble the despicable doctrine of contempt of it. The more strange, since it is a matter of sober scientific truth that the human body is the highest and most wonderful work in nature, the last and best achievement of her creative skill; it is a most complex and admirably constructed organism, "fearfully and wonderfully made," which contains, as it were in a microcosm, all the ingenuity and harmony and beauty of the macrocosm. And it is this supreme product of evolution that fanatics have gained the honor of saintship by disfiguring and torturing!

These, then, are two great reasons of the repugnance which is felt to materialism, namely, the notion that it is destructive of the hope of a resurrection, and the contempt of the body which has been inculcated as a religious duty. And yet on these very points materialism seems fitted to teach the spiritualist lessons of humility and reverence, for it teaches him, in the first place, not to despise and call unclean the last and best work of his Creator's hand; and, secondly, not impiously to circumscribe supernatural power by the narrow limits of