Page:Aesthetic Papers.djvu/110

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100
The Dorian Measure.

system of the new-born, proceed so summarily as did the Dorians with the infirm of body. They accept this evil, when it comes; and the education of the blind, of the deaf, even of the idiot, is in proportion to that richness of resource, indicated, as the gift of God to man, by him who is said to have healed by his touch all the ills that flesh is heir to. A study and analysis of the physical constitution of man, and of the origin and law of its life, united with a sacred sense and practice of duty, shall, in some future on earth, ensure to all who are born, a fair physical constitution, and a subsequent preservation of the same—perhaps to euthanasia.

This part of culture rests so much with parents, that it can only be indirectly reached by a public system. Yet society should feel it a duty, as society, to provide for the study and diffusion of all knowledge on this subject. A partial apprehension of the Christian religion, in times past, has led to a general perversion of thought concerning every thing pertaining to the body. To die bodily with Christ has been that for which saints were canonized. Strange that even those who so clung to the letter which killeth, should have read so partially the letter, that they did not see, that, if Christ's body was tormented and buried, yet it rose again, not subject to decay, but capable of being assimilated to the glory which eye hath not seen; for God did not suffer his holy one to see corruption. The symbolic meaning of the death has been considered much more deeply than the symbolic meaning of the resurrection, which is the complement of the spiritual truth he died to express. Christendom has depreciated the physical system, so that the conscience, which should form and preserve the body in a perfect harmony with nature, has not been developed. Truly, as St. James saith, "he that sinneth in one thing sinneth in all." By this neglect, the mind and spirit have been warped, weakened, and injured, beyond our power to estimate.

A truly Christian system of culture would not neglect a proper gymnastic of the body. It appropriates all that the Dorian culture discovered. Not only the military drill, with running, fencing, and every exercise that developes without brutalizing, should be made a part of the exercises of the