TO HUMAN CULTURE. BY O. DEWEY. hearty, manly English reverence and love which | THE MINISTRY OF THE senses and appPETITES the workingmen show towards those who love and serve them truly, and save them from themselves and from doing wrong. See how David's feelings gush forth (v. 33)—' Blessed But admitting that the appetites have their be the Lord God of Israel which sent thee uses-which is the first position I take it is this day to meet me; and blessed be thy ad- said, nevertheless, that they have bad tendenvice, and blessed be thou which has kept me cies, tendencies to excess, to vice, to ruin. On this day from coming to shed blood, and from this point, there is, in the second place, a most avenging myself with mine own hand.' The rich important distinction to be made; and that is, and the great may have that love, if they will. between appetite in its simple, natural state, and To conclude. Doubtless, David was wrong; appetite in its artificial and unnatural state; a he had no right even to redress wrongs thus. state brought on by voluntary habit and corPatience was his divine appointed duty; and, rupting imagination and mental destitution; for doubtless, in such circumstances we should be which man's will is responsible, and not his very ready to preach submission, and to blame constitution. Look then at simple, unsophisti David. Alas! we the clergy of the Church of cated, unperverted appetite. Is the draught of England, have been only too ready to do this: intemperance, or the surfeit of gluttony, natfor three long centuries we have taught sub-urally agreeable? Far otherwise. Moreover, mission to the powers that be, as if that were all those stimulant and narcotic substances and the only text in Scripture bearing on the rela- those rich condiments, of which excess makes tions between the ruler and the ruled. Rarely its principal use, are naturally distasteful and have we dared to demand of the powers that be, justice of the wealthy man, and of the titled, duties. We have produced folios of slavish flattery upon the Divine Right of Power. Shame on us! we have not denounced the wrongs done to weakness: and yet, for one text in the Bible which requires submission and patience from the poor, you will find a hundred which denounce the vices of the rich;-in the writings of the noble old Jewish prophets, that, and almost that only ;-that in the Old Testament, with a deep roll of words that sound like Sinai thunders; and that in the New Testament, in words less impassioned and more calmly terrible from the apostles and their Master-and woe to us, in the great day of God, if we have been the sycophants of the rich, instead of the Redressers of the poor man's wrongs-woe to us if we have been tutoring David into respect to his superior, Nabal, and forgotten that David's cause, not Nabal's, is the cause of God!" EXTRACT. The ministry of Friends affected me greatly, and was often a means of comfort and strength. I never suffered myself to criticise it, but acted on the uniform principle of endeavoring to obtain from what I heard all the edification which it afforded. This is a principle which I would warmly recommend to my young friends in the present day; for nothing can be more mischievous than for learners to turn teachers, and young hearers critics. I am persuaded that it is often the means of drying up the waters of life in the soul; and sure I am that an exact method of weighing words and balancing doctrines in what we hear is a miserable exchange for tenderness of spirit and for the dews of heaven."-J. J. Gurney. disgusting in the highest degree. I do not say that even they were created in vain, or must necessarily be injurious; for everything is good in its place and degree-even poison is so; but I say that there is no natural demand for these strong stimulants. On the contrary, fever in the veins, poison in the blood, sickness, nausea, are remonstrances of simple appetite, remonstrances of nature against them. And show me what diseased and vicious passion you will, and I will show you that it is the mind's guilt, and not the body's defect; that it is not the passion let alone, still less duly controlled by the higher nature. It is not nature, but bad example or companionship, that leads to evil. It is imagination that nurses passion into criminal desire. There is a natural modesty which unhallowed license always has to overcome. Let no man lay that flattering unction to his soul, that God has made him to love evilmade vice and baseness to be naturally agreeable to him; for it is not true! But these appetites, besides their general uses, and besides their natural innocence, seem to me, in the third place, to bear a specific relation to the mind. They are urgent teachers. They teach, first, moderation. They teach the necessity of self-restraint, of self-denial. I have no doubt that a being not clothed with flesh, a pure spiritual essence, would feel the necessity of self-restraint. But if any physical organization, belonging to an intellectual nature, could be made to enforce this law, it appears to me that it would be that of our human senses and appetites. Because it is manifest that their unrestrained indulgence works the direst ruin to the whole nature. What! does this our sensitive frame teach lessons of evil, lessons of vice? God and nature forbid! Open, patent, and everlasting fact teaches the very contrary. 262 The woes of intemperance, gluttony, licentious- you. I have all the regions of existence, and never was abused, till I came in contact with made a part of animal natures, that were innocent; I have lived in the beautiful forms of vegetable life; I have flowed in the streams and sported in the air, all purity and freshness and freedom; and never till I was subjected to your influence, was I breathed upon by any bad spirit; never till then, was I tainted by the diseases of vice, or made a loathsome mass of sinwrought corruption; never till then, was my nature perverted from its uses, and made the instrument of evil." But to speak most seriously: What a wonderful, moral structure is our physical frame! If a command to be pure were written, imprinted in visible letters, upon every limb and muscle, it could not be a clearer mandate, and by no means so powerful. It was said to the Such a message mad and rebellious Saul, "It is hard for thee to kick against the thorns." comes indeed from no open vision, but from his inmost frame, to every raging voluptuary. Thorns and tortures does it shoot out against him from every part. If, every time he indulged in any excess, he was covered with nettles and stings, the intimation would not be a whit more monitory than it is now. You You must have patience with me, my friends, for I must overthrow entirely, and utterly deHow different is it with the animal! molish this plea of the senses for vice. My argument for the ministry of the senses and ap- may feed him to repletion; you may fatten him petites, cannot stand at all, unless I do that. into a monster; and there is no disease, no sufThe truth is, the senses, fittest for virtue, hap-fering; there is only enjoyment; and so far as piest in innocence, are only capable of vice- he is destined for food, he is the more fitted for But if you do this to man, disthat is all, but no conceivable organization his purpose. could be surrounded with more tremendous ease and pain enter in at every pore. So the mind is remonstrances against evil. capable of evil, and so is the mind, too, guarded. And it might as well be said that the mind seduces to ill, as that the body does-nay, I think, But because better-with far more reason. sensual aberration is more apparent, and the effects are more visible, therefore the world, with little insight as yet into the truth of things, has agreed to charge this fact of temptation especially upon the body. It would be coming nearer to the truth to say, that the mind is the real culprit. The ancient philosophers, in their theories, desecrated matter; the modern, and especially the sensual school in France, have deified it. They boldly proclaimed-I speak of the French infidel philosophers of the latter part of the eighteenth century-they boldly proclaimed matter to be the true divinity; the human frame, its altar; and the appetites, its priesthood. Selfishness with them was the only motive; sensation, the only good; and life a bowing down in worship to the appropriate divinity. But whoever tries that theory, will find that What are the comparatively poor, puny, and matter is indeed a god, too powerful for him; innocent senses, but servants of the mind-the fleshly altar will be burned up and destroyed compelled to do its bidding? I know it is a doctrine of old time, that the body does all the mischief; that the body is the enemy of the mind, a clog, an encumbrance, a corrupter. The philosopher, Plotinus, affected to have forgotten his birthplace and parentage, because, says Porphyry," he was ashamed that his soul was in a body." He imagined that the mind had good cause to complain of the body. But I believe it would not be difficult, and scarcely "I have fanciful, to set forth a counter plea. wandered"-might the substance of the body say to the mind-"I have wandered through by the strange fire that is laid upon it; and the priests, the appetites, will perish in that profane ministration. The Government builds prisons for culprits, and protects the honest house. All men pronounce that to be a moral administration. But what if, when wrong was perpetrated in the honest house, and it had become the habitation of the base and vile, it should, by some wonder-working intervention of the Government, grow dark and desolate, and should gradually turn into a prison-the windows narrowing year by year, and grated bars growing over them; the rooms, the ceilings, slowly the grave at last, from a life which has been one long sigh. And all might have been prevented by one brisk daily walk in the open air. darkening; the aspects of cheerful and com- | spoil it of its gladness, and send their victim to fortable abode gradually disappearing, and gloom and filth coming instead, and silence broken only by the sobs and moans of prisoners, or the sadder sound of cursing or revelling? Such, mark it well! becomes the body, the more immediate house of life, to every abandoned transgressor! Not alone the mount that burned with fire, utters the commandment of God; not alone the tabernacle of Moses, covered with cloud and shaken with thunder; but this cloud-tabernacle of life, which God has erected for the spirit's dwelling, and the electric nerves that dart sensation-like lightning through it-all its wonders, all its mysteries, all its veiled secrets, all its familiar recesses, are full of urgent and momentous teaching. But there is something further to be observed concerning this teaching; there is one respect in which it is yet more urgent. For it demands not only moderation and self-denial, but activity: it forbids not only excess, but in dolence. It demands of those that do not labor, daily, out-of-door exercise-not a lounge in a carriage only, but a walk, or some bracing exercise in the open air-demands that, or says, "pay for your neglect." Some inuring, some hardness-hardship if they please to call itnature exacts even of the gentlest of its children. The world was not built to be a hothouse, but a gymnasium rather. Voluptuous repose, luxurious protection, enervating food and modes of life, are not the good condition, not the permitted resort, for our physical nature. Half of the physician's task with many, is to fight off the effects of such abuses. The laws of the human constitution are moral laws; they address the conscience, the moral nature; they exact penalties for neglect. And doubtless the penalties are severe. That is not nature's fault, but nature's excellence. Doubtless the penalties are severe. I am persuaded, indeed, that if they could be enumerated; if all the languid and heavy pulses could be numbered; if all the miseries of nervous and diseased sensation could be defined; if all that could be described which surrounds us with wasted forms, or sequesters them in silent chambers, an aggregate of ills could be found which would match the statistics of pauperism, or of intemperance itself. I believe there is less suf. fering among the idler and more luxurious classes, from violent disorders, than from those chronic and nervous ailments, which do not always inflict acute pain, which do not alarm us for the patient-well if they did!—but which enfeeble the energies, destroy the elasticity of the frame, undermine the very constitution of the body; which depress the spirits, too, wear out the patience, sour the temper, cloud the vision of nature, disrobe society of its beauty and de This subject and I mean now this whole subject of the right training and care of the body-is one, I conceive, of unappreciated importance. Our physical nature is more than the theatre, more than the stage, it is the very costume, the very drapery in which the mind acts its part; and if it hangs loosely or awkwardly upon the actor, if it weighs him down as a burden, or entangles his step at every turn, the action, the great action of life must be lame and deficient. What that burden, that entanglement is now; and what is the genuine vigor and health of a man; what is the true, spiritual ministry of the body to the soul, I am persuaded, we do not yet know. (To be continued.) Despondency in God's service is sinful and unreasonable, for He is both able and ready to bestow upon his servants any measure of strength and wisdom which their necessities may demand. COMPANIONSHIP. BY MARY G. CHANDler. (Continued from page 247.) The Companionship of our fellow-beings is not confined to the living men and women around us, but comes to us through books, from all nations and ages. Wise teachers stand ever ready to instruct us, gentle moralists to console and strengthen us, poets to delight us. Scarce a country village is so poor that there may not be found beneath its roofs the printed words of more great men than ever lived at any one period of the earth's great history. We are too apt to use books, as well as society, merely for our amusement; to read the books that chance to fall into our hands, or to associate with the persons we happen to meet with, and not stop to ask ourselves if nothing better is within our reach. It may not be in our power to associate with great living minds, but the mental wealth of the past is within the reach of all. We boast much that we are a reading people, but it may be well to inquire how intelligently we read. The catalogues of books borrowed from our public libraries show, that, where the readers of works of amusement are counted by hun.. dreds, the readers of instructive books are numbered by units. In conversation it is not uncommon to hear persons expressing indifference or dislike to whole classes of books,-to hear Travels denounced as stupid, Biography as tame, and History as heavy and dull. It does not seem to occur to the mass of minds that any purpose beyond the amusement of the moment is to be thought of in reading, or that any plan should be laid, or any principle adopt- | through the streets, teaching them their first ed in the choice of books to be read. lessons in vulgar vanity. It is undoubtedly a great good that nearly all our people are taught to read, but it is a small fraction of the community that reads to much good purpose. Children, so soon as they have acquired the use of the alphabet, are inundated with little juvenile stories, some of them good, but most of them silly, and many vulgar. As they grow older, successions of similar works of fiction await them, until they arrive at adolescence, when they are fully prepared for all the wealth of folly, vulgarity, falsehood, and wickedness that is bound up within the yellow covers of most of the cheap novels that infest every highway of the na tion. As you are jostled through the streets of our populous cities, or take your seat in a crowded railway-car, you are, perhaps, impressed with the general air of rudeness that pervades the scene,- —a rudeness of a kind so new to the world, that, no old word sufficing to describe it, a new name has been coined, and the swaggering, careless, sensual looking beings, reeking with the fumes of tobacco, that make up the masses of our moving population, are adequately described only by the word rowdy. As yet no title has been found for the female of this class,-bold, dashing, loud-talking and loud-laughing, ignorant, vain, and so coarse that she supposes fine clothes and assuming manners are all that is necessary to elevate her to the rank of a lady. Perhaps you wonder how so numerous a race of these beings has come to exist; but that boy at your elbow, bending under the weight of his literary burden, is a colporteur for converting the men and women of this "enlightened nation" to rowdyism. Those books portray just such men and women as you see before you, and that is why they are welcomed so warmly. A few cents will buy from that boy enough folly and impurity to gorge a human mind for a week, and possibly few among this throng often taste more wholesome intellectual food. It is probable that some of these persons are the children of intelligent and well-bred parents; but their fathers were engrossed in business, and their mothers in family cares, and thought they had no time to form the moral and intellectual tastes of the immortal minds committed to their charge. They fancied that, if they sent their children to good schools, and provided liberally for all their external wants, they had done enough. Ignorant nurserymaids, perhaps, taught them morals and manners, while the father toiled to accumulate the means for supplying their external wants, and the mother hemmed ruffles and scalloped trimming, to make people say, "How sweetly those children are dressed!" as the maid paraded them A child may be educated at the best schools without acquiring any taste for good literature. The way a parent treats a child in relation to its books has far more influence in this respect than a teacher can possibly possess. A mother, even if she is not an educated woman, can learn to read understandingly, and can teach her child to read in the same way. She can talk to it about its books, and awaken a desire in its mind to understand what it reads. Children are always curious in regard to the phenomena of nature, and whether this curiosity lives or dies depends very much on the answers it receives to its first questions. If the mother cannot answer them herself, she can help the child to find an answer somewhere else, and she should beware how she deceives herself with the idea that she has not time to attend to the moral and intellectual wants of her child. She has no right to so immerse all her own mind in the cares of life that she cannot, while attending to them, talk rationally with her children. The mothers who best fulfil their higher duties towards their children are quite as often found among those who are compelled to almost constant industry of the hands, as among those of abundant leisure. There is nothing in the handiwork of the house-keeper or the seamstress that need absorb all the mental attention; and hers must be an ill-regulated mind that cannot ply the needle, or perform the more active duties of the household, and yet listen to the child as it reads its little books, and converse with it about the moral lessons or the intellectual instruction they contain. The mother has it in her power to influence the mode in which the child makes companions of its books, more than any other person; and the character of its Companionship with them through life will generally depend in a great degree on the tastes and habits acquired in childhood. Many parents who guard their children with jealous care from the contamination of rude and vicious society among other children, allow them to associate with ideal companions of a very degraded kind. The parent should check the propensity, not only to read bad books, but also to read idle or foolish books, by exciting the action of the mind towards something better. Merely to deny improper books is not enough. Something must be given in place of them, or the craving must continue, and the child will be very apt to gratify its appetite in secret. Children are easily led to observe nature, animate or inanimate, with interest, and there are many simple books illustrating the departments of natural science which mothers could make interesting to their children at the same time that they instructed themselves. Juvenile works on history abound, and through them the FRIENDS' INTELLIGENCER. the art of the beaver, the antics of the monkey, PHILADELPHIA, SIXTH MONTH 29, 1867. EARLY HOME-CULTURE.—The proper train- impressed with the responsibility connected to be met. That it has not at all times been and the habits of many of the plants familiar to most, will be as entertaining in their development to the mind of the uninitiated, as the work of the Fairies drawn out in its wild fancies. The one will have furnished material for future use, while the other would sow pernicious weeds to be sooner or later eradicated. The importance of a right cultivation of the literary tastes of children cannot be over-estimated. At schools knowledge is acquired which is deemed essential, but if a judicious care is not extended by parents, there may be the luxuriant vine without nutritious fruit. Many Friends are aware that the Association of Friends of Philadelphia, within the past few years, has published several little books for the Some evipurpose of aiding the good cause. dences have been furnished that the labor has not been in vain, but we could wish that there We believe that not unfrequently the proper ored cuts which abound for the purpose, with- which allusion has been made. "The Scriptural Watchword" is a valuable book when viewed in connection with the need we have of help amid the pressing cares of life, to turn the mind to the unfailing Fountain of strength. Thoughts for Children" contains much that is suggestive for a wider range in the same direction. The two little books of "Devotional Poetry" have been compiled with care, and breathe the spirit of love and purity in an eminent degree. If children were encouraged to commit some of these selections to memory, we doubt not that in after years they would arise with the brance of youthful days, when by kind parents odor of a grateful heart to refresh the rememthese children were taught to remember their Creator. In every branch of knowledge this system jured by premature thought or reflection, we * As furnished by T. Ellwood Zell, Nos. 17 and 19 South Sixth Street, and Emmor Comly, at the office of |