to scholarship, of one kind and another; let it find its mission. For it remains to you not only to find its increase, Here is life, and you carry into it but to find its use. what it greatly needs. learned all of it yet. Think not that possibility in either is concluded; that literature has all been written, that life with its great opportunities is exhausted. The last word. has not been said, the best deed has not been done. There is yet truth, there is yet life, great, rich, untried. They wait for your coming. Be it yours to use what you have learned, and to turn truth into life. Always may this great University stand, with doors opening both ways,—inward toward all truth, known or unknown; outward toward life, and the wants of the world. Always in her training may the reconciliation be made between thought and action, letters and life. She sends forth her children, not as literary dilettanti,— Here is truth, and you have not "To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, not to be mere critics while others do the work of the CHRISTIANITY AND THE BODY.1 THE body, by some inevitable law of things, seems to take a large share of human life. Man is always an animal, whatever else and better he may be. His foundation is in the dust, where his earthly existence begins and ends, and finds its necessary subsistence. He is a physical creature, his life rooted in a material world. To lodge, to feed, to clothe, to transport, to heal the body, takes more time, more force, costs more than anything else. It takes a third of every day, a third of all human life for sleep, simply to repair its natural and constant waste. Civilization in its industries, its commerce, its legislations, its inventions, in almost all its business, is taking care of the body. To heal its diseases requires one of the most learned and laborious professions. To build houses and roads for it, to set its table, to keep it covered and to keep it warm, employs the largest part of the labor, if not of the intelligence, of mankind. And more than that, the multiplied Providential arrangements, all things in heaven and earth, the coming and going of the sun and the seasons, the distribution of heat and moisture, the climates and soils, not the harvests only which feed great nations, but the luxuries which please the palate and the smell, the fine vicissitudes of color which delight the eye, the endless harmonies which charm the ear, all these vast contributions of nature to human senses and appetites, tell of the Creator's care for the body. No man takes so much pains and care for himself 1 Read at the Second Annual Baptist Autumnal Conference in Boston, November 13, 1883. as nature, as its and his Almighty Maker does for him, and for his body, which at best lasts only threescore years and ten. And more than that; consider the expenditure of force, intellectual and moral, in using it, even in subduing it, in taming its passions, in controlling its energies, in bearing its infirmities. Without its senses the mind is locked up in an impenetrable box, and has no development. With it the mind has an alert servant, a potent instrument, by which the whole face of the earth is transformed. There is no force of nature, no power in the other creatures, equal to it. The human hand has wrought the wonders of the world; it has built the temples of religion; it makes lenses and scalpels, a needle and a locomotive; it steers the plow and the ship; it performs the gentlest and the mightiest tasks; it has fashioned all the conveniences of civilized life; it has executed the laws of intelligence in all the physical life of man. When we count the debt of the world to mind, we must count also the debt of the mind to the body, without which in a world like this it would be impotent. Thought is a power, but what is it without the pen and the type? Ideas are mighty, but they must have the voice of the orator, even the cannon of armies. It is the soldier's sword, the workman's tool, the printer's type; it is the thinker's thought put into act; it is the soul finding communication through words, through deeds; it is physical forces obeying the law and idea of the mind, which rule the world. Without the body they would be dreams of the night, impalpable and powerless. And so it happens, or rather so it is in the very nature of things, that every science has to take the body into account. Psychology cannot escape it, but has to answer the questions of materialism, and validate the soul's knowledge of what is so unlike it as the material world. Ethics crosses at all points questions which belong to man's phys ical nature and estate. The tenure of land, the wages of labor, the relations of capital, the regulation or suppression of sensual evils, are the vexed and flagrant questions with which sociology has to deal, and they all belong to man's physical life. And so it can hardly be that religion, even in its most spiritual type, can keep itself out of relationship with the body. If it is a religion from God, it is a religion for man, and therefore must take him as it finds him, a soul in a body, the spiritual life always in a physical envelope. This is the presumption for Christianity, that it at least understands human nature, and will come to man as he is, not yet out of the body. It would go wide of the mark if it were a religion for pure spirits, and did not recognize man's actual nature and life. Its contention with materialism is not against the body, but in behalf of the soul. In fact, it is hard to see how it could touch the soul with redemptive power and not affect that physical life in which the soul acts. It could not nicely divide between man's twofold nature, reaching the greater and not the less. The intelligence cannot escape the influence of its purified affections; and the body cannot remain unaffected by a rectified will. The moral energy of Christianity must go into the physical life of nations. Such a religion cannot go on a straight line from the cross of Calvary to the New Jerusalem, snatching and carrying along such souls as it can by the way, without leavening their earthly life. The notion of an atomic, individual religion, with no organic development and no social work, flees, or ought to flee, out of men's minds. The notion of a religion which in its spirituality avoids the secular, and even the physical, as out of its domain, does not belong to living and practical and victorious Christianity. It is significant that the inchoate, germinal religion out of which Christianity emerged made so much of the body. Its worship required at least a clean person, and its pre scriptions about dresses and ablutions, about separations and contacts, about postures and acts, were minute and rigid, whatever symbolic significance they may have had. In the institutes of Moses, sanitary regulations were religious, and provisions against physical defilement had the force of moral law. His legislation mingled the religious and the secular, the care of the body and the worship of God; while all the promises of the Mosaic covenant joined the possession of the land and length of days, the subsistence and continuance of the body, with obedience. to Jehovah. The Levitical religion was a ritualism, whatever lay behind it, and so far was of the body; as the Epistle to the Hebrews says "which stood only in meats and drinks and divers washings and carnal ordinances imposed on them until the time of reformation." 1 The time of reformation arrived, and the new religion was one of the spirit. Its worship was not local; its Church was not national; its God was invisible. Its first requirement was faith; its first agency was, not even the written word, but the invisible Spirit of Truth. It made no requirement of outward cleanliness, hardly of outward observance, but of truth and penitence and love in the inward parts. If Christianity had any distinction as against the old religion, against all religions, it was as a dispensation of the Spirit, and on this account was "rather glorious." But with spirituality for its one and specific note, there are some significant facts which link it to the body. First, there is the doctrine of Incarnation, which Christian thought more and more brings to the centre, and which makes humanity, even the human body, the sacred tabernacle of the Redeeming Lord. “Forasmuch as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself took part of the same."2 He came into the line of human generations, into the physical life of the race. He 1 Heb. ix. 10. 2 Heb. ii. 14. |