Let us Pass on Rather to the Gentler Sex
Where are the sprightly, modest maidens with cheeks rosy with healthy blood,
graceful in figure with well developed forms—the chaste, pure spirit shining in
their eyes, with witchery and common sense combined? Where are the fathers and
mothers whose good fortune it is to possess such children as these? Can it be that
they should deem these caricatures of fashion worthy of their fond desire?—these
whose days are spent in idling, who find their pleasure in the streets, the shops, the
theatres and the like they term "society?"
Those men are old at forty
years. Those youths too often die at twenty, dissipated wrecks,
holding as a mere ceremony the marriage they expect eventually
to consummate; or married, now and then produce a single child
that had far better never have been born.
What of those mothers who cannot nourish their own offspring, but fain would
make shift with all imaginable unnatural substitutes and bring up children in whom
a predisposition to disease has already been born?
Oh nature! High and mighty mistress! A bitter penalty dost thou exact from these
thine erring progeny.
And rightly so.
Cruelly plain dost thou stamp thy mark on the tiny brow of the unborn child to
mark in what degree its parents have departed from thine eternal ways of truth.
When a great man, recently, in his address before the body of a famous university,
solemnly asserted that mankind is growing better, day by day, he must have had
before his inner eye fair visions of a future race—the Future of Truth, which come
it must—some day—but now lies dormant in the lap of the gods, its alluring,
visionary, transcendental form depicted, for an optimistic instant, in the fervent,
hopeful heart of a sincere but far-sighted reformer. But it is written: false prophets
must come, deceiving in respect to all things in heaven and earth. "Mundus vult
decipi, ergo decipiatur." (The world wishes to be deceived, therefore, let it be
deceived.) The world elects to be deceived. It is so—often on the most paltry of
pretences. And here lies the fatal and prolific cause which has ever, throughout the
ages, wrought infinite harm and impeded the progress of the world:
The world's indifference to truth.
For the proper understanding and radical cure of any disease it is of primary
importance to have before the mind's eye a distinct picture of its character and
developments, thus tracing it back step by step to its source, so that the therapeutic,
or healing measures employed may be properly adjusted to its various stages.
Nature has her foes, chief amongst which are ignorance, indulgence and fear; and
these foes have ever waged fierce warfare upon her from time immemorial. But
today a positive spiritual revolution is being wrought among men, for Mother
Nature is calling defaulting humanity back to herself with no uncertain voice.
Back to Nature is now the cry.
Never before were homilies on food so manifold and the ability to profit by them so
diminished; never were remedies so abundant and conditions of health so bad;
never were deeds of charity so numerous and the poor so discontented; never were
measures of reform so prominent and their results so meagre; never was production
of commodities so enormous and the cost of living so excessive; never were the
resources of all the world so accessible and counterfeits so plentiful; never was
enlightenment so widely diffused and sound judgment so restricted; never were the
avenues of truth so open, yet never was falsehood so widespread, as in our time.
Our age—well named by Dr. Rudolph Weil, the Age of Nerves—has brought to
our service the most significant development of natural forces—electricity in all its
forms of application, to medicine and industry and traffic; the expression of motive
power in terms of machinery—railroads, ocean travel, air navigation, and endless
appliances from the almost limitless scope of which, in the hands of man, the
master, not even the very wild beasts escape. Meanwhile however—most strange
anomaly—mankind degenerates in body and still more in mind.
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