future. My present purpose is only to point the way whereby the present life-round may be lengthened and made to culminate in a ripe and happy autumn.

Every primordial atom of the body, every cell, having served its purpose, dies, and gives place to another. Accordingly by the use of proper digestible foods; by pure healthy drinks; by vigorous assimilation; by wisely appropriating and adjusting the right atoms, molecules, and elements, thus refining, purifying, and spiritualizing the body, why should it not upon reaching a certain key-note in the scale of spirituality defy the death struggle, the casket, and the tomb? This would constitute the real resurrection of the body, a body innately fashioned for immortality. It will also intensify and swell the old apostolic shout, "Oh, death, where is thy sting! Oh, grave, where is thy victory?"

"The death of the Old Time is waning and failing,

The life of the New Time o'erreaches our tears, The orbs of the Old Time are fading and paling, The sun of the New Time is gilding the years."

THE INTRODUCTION.

"WHY wilt thou die?" was the soul-felt inquiry of an old Semitic prophet.

Death, early death, altogether too fashionable, accompanied with extravagant funerals, is abnormal. Life, the reverse of death, is natural, and should be with us all not only beautiful but golden with joy and as serene and abiding as the stars. The pivotal man, the perfected coming man, however vestured and pronounced mortal, will be on earth immortal. In vision I see it; know it.

Annihilation is unthinkable. It is both a physical and a moral impossibility. No philosopher, no logician, teaches or talks of the destruction of substance; that is, the transformation of something into nothing. Once in existence, always in existence, is virtually axiomatic. If not existence itself, life is surely in existence, pulsating in suns, stars, and sea-shore sands, vibrating and throbbing in every cell and sinew of the human body-aye, more, every atom in man is a center of force and aflame with undying life. Then why should mortals die? Is there anything attractive in caskets and cemeteries? Is there anything musical in the echoing clods that fall upon and cover the draped coffins of silence? Is not life a Divine gift, a golden chain of sequences from the Divine Original? Why, then, should a link in this silvery chain be broken and the mourners go about the streets?

Step down in thought from man for a moment, O thinker, and consider inferior animal existence. The insect that hums, the bird that sings, the patient cow, and the proud horse that neighs to his prairie companion-these naturally die, but does

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it legitimately follow that it is right for them to die at the crimsoned hands of man? By whose permission, sir, do you kill and carve the lamb and the light-footed gazelle? By whose authority do you slaughter and devour the peaceful grazing ox that ploughs the field, or the cows that furnish milk for your children?

Under the unfolding, uplifting genius of evolution, human sacrifices, in and about the templed gods of the Orient and in the far-away isles of the ocean, have vanished. Yet, innocent animals are still sacrificed on the Asian steppes and upon Africa's far-off shores to appease the wrath of the gods-a sort of ecclesiastic cannibalism.

But how is it in civilized countries? To the sensitive and the spiritually cultured it is extremely painful to look upon our fashionable tables of luxury-tables in Christian lands spread, laden with the dead and mangled bodies of grain and grass-eating herds, with music-breathing birds, murdered victims and cooked corpses, for the sole purpose of gratifying an abnormal appetite.

The Chicago Tribune of a recent date published the following:

"Tuberculosis is slow to kill cattle, and a diseased cow may go on giving infected milk for years, and in the end affording meat for the family, and yet not showing pronounced symptoms of the malady.

"No inspection for tuberculosis is required by law, and practically none ever has been made in Illinois, or, for that matter, in the greater part of the Union. Yet it is now estimated that over 20 per cent of the cows that supply milk to the large cities have tuberculosis. Out of a herd of forty-six milch cows recently tested at Springfield the twenty-seven slaughtered in Chicago on Monday all had tuberculosis, and six were isolated as doubtful. Other herds have shown an equal percentage of diseased animals.

"The failure of Koch's lymph as a cure for consumption, besides giving an impetus to the whole system of serum therapy, paved the way for the development and manufacture of tuber

culin. This consists principally of the poisonous products formed by consumption germs in their growth on living tissue. When injected into the circulation of a consumptive animal it causes a marked rise in temperature. In Governor Tanner the commissioners have secured a strong ally, and there is great hope that much-needed action toward checking the production and sale of infected milk and meats will be taken."

And yet, many intelligent people actually eat these diseased animals-these corpses, when boiled or cooked!

Does the word corpse shock you? That's right. You ought to be shocked at the mere sight or mention of such barbarous butchery. If you were not thus shocked and thrilled with ghastly horror, it would be an almost unanswerable argument in favor of total depravity. Butchers are wisely forbidden in some states to sit as jurors. Children, pure and innocent, shrink from slaughter houses of blood. They stink.

Being shocked being startled, at such phrases as "cooking and eating animal corpses," baked, boiled, fried, or stewedand making the human stomach a graveyard, a very Golgotha, for the deposit of dead carcasses, shows that all conscience, all susceptibility, all moral emotion, is not quite extinct in human nature. It shows, further, or is rather a confirmation, of the old medical maxim, that "those who eat animal flesh have worms." And certainly it is not nice nor clean to be wormy. Trichinæ that find their way from swine into human beings are a species of worms.

A New Zealand cannibal, who had helped to eat eighteen human beings, told me that roasted human beings and roasted pigs tasted very much alike. He richly enjoyed both. Doubtless those who live in the year 2000 will look back and pronounce the flesh-devouring inhabitants of this country and century a sort of Anglicized animal eating set of cannibals.

Cannibalism has its horrors; but to those who study cannibalism there are hidden under it certain extenuating circumstances. The flesh of human bodies is more easily digested, and more readily assimilated than the flesh of sheep, beeves,

and swine. And then there are greater sins to our neighbors than to cannibalize them. To cut and eat human flesh after a man is dead, is far less horrible in one sense than to oppress, enslave, and starve him while he lives.

Lions, tigers, jackals, and wolves are carnivorous animalsmen, naturally, are not. They have been educated to flesheating. The poets of Ovid's time were vegetarians. The Baptist John's meat was locusts and wild honey. The Edenic food was nuts, fruits, and vegetables. This statement will not be disputed by adepts in history. Beautiful and tender are these lines from Goldsmith:

"No flocks that range the valley free

To slaughter I condemn;

Taught by the power that pities me,
I learn to pity them;

But from the mountain's grassy side,
A guiltless feast I bring;

A scrip with herbs and fruits supplied,
And water from the spring.'

A distinguished English physician, Dr. John Gardner, in a work upon longevity, said:

"Before the flood men are said to have lived five and even nine hundred years; and as a physiologist, I can assert positively that there is no fact reached by science to contradict or render this improbable. It is more difficult, on scientific grounds, to explain why men die at all, than to believe in the duration of life for a thousand years.'

The human body, a temple, a tabernacle, a machine, perfect in adaptation when normal, contains within itself no marks by which we can positively predict its decay. Considered structurally it was evidently designed to go on forever. Herbert Spencer suggests that death from old age, like death from disease, is a result of inadequate intelligence. Know thyself, then, and live forever.

J. M. P.