are to steal out of life and time back again into eternity, by etherization. Birth and death, the two sacred facts that bound life, and give meaning to life to man and woman, are to be blotted out by ether and chloroform. The words birth and death are to vanish out of human language. They are to signify no fact any longer to the civilized human species. Let them be for barbarians and the lower orders of animals, who have blind instincts, and not the majesty of knowledge. The triumphs of science are for us. We are not longer to say, he was born, he died; but he was etherized into life, he was etherized out of life. Have you heard the news? They tell us pain is dead now.

Ether and chloroform are invented. Will pain thereupon, outwitted, die? Nay; but it will increase and be multiplied, for the use of these agents will lead to more transgression. Their use will corrupt still further the organization, and produce secondary forms of disease, complicating still more the already inextricably complicated science of disease. We cannot dodge the laws of being by chemical science. We cannot hope-can we?-to remedy rottenness in our bones and flesh by producing asphyxia? Pain is not dead. But where is physical constitution, where is character, where is heroism?

Death is sleep. The progress to it in the act of dying ought, in the true natural order, to be without pain, a going to sleep. In a pure, true life, without the corruptions of medicine, it would be a going to sleep. Birth is a purely natural function, the creation of man continued; and no more pain would be in it, in the true natural order, than belongs to it to make it birth, and give signification to a mother's love, and sacred devotion to a mother's office. In a pure, true life, without the corruptions of medicine, in a healthy frame, birth is tolerable, birth is easy. Deliverance it always must be, for that is its essence, and the crown of its rejoicing.

Shame upon the philosophy of medicine, which would thus filch from maternity its sacred meaning, and drug into unconsciousness the deepest capacity for experience in earthly life. How can we abide the philosophy of a practice, which presumes that a child can be a right child, thus chemically deposited from Lethe, not born of a mother? Shall we renew, in the daily habits of the nineteenth century of the Christian era, the fabulous witchery of Circe, and call it medical science? Let the philosophy of medicine apply itself to the regeneration of these organized bodies by purity, by simplicity of diet, by healthy conditions of active life, and then it need not meddle with birth and death. Let it lead us back to vital power in the frame and constitution, and then let birth and death be left to us, facts too near the unseen world to be tampered with. Let medical science affirm the grave fact, let it warn us personally of the dreadful truth, that there are frames and conditions of men and women in civilization, to whom the offices of father and mother are not suited. Let it terrify such of us from paternity and maternity, by the thought of pain to ourselves, and a life of pain and abridgment of the due functions of life to offspring. Let it authoritatively pronounce, in the name of the whole race, and with that sanction, that to be father and mother in such case is criminal, if the relation be knowingly taken; and let the knowledge of these matters be so much a

habit of learning, and life, and conversation with us, that ignorance herein shall be impossible. What a noble gossip that would be! Let not medical science help on these unsuitable generations by promises of insensibility to pain. Let not drug science in ether and chloroform entice thus to degeneration of the species, by offering a bounty on acts of wrong.

To what a point of perversion habits of life may come, with the sanction of medical science, we see now in a conspicuous example. A steamer, last winter, brought this paragraph for our newspapers across the deep:

"Queen Victoria, according to the late London papers, has summoned Dr. Simpson, of Edinburgh, the first who employed chloroform in obstetrics, to London. If she gives it the benefit of her example, it will probably be introduced into general practice."

The steamer which brought us the news of the French revolution, brought us also the account of the delivery of the Queen of England.

Ever since her marriage, Queen Victoria has been accustomed to bear her yearly tribute of offspring, for the breasts of the wet nurses, and the appropriations of the civil list. At the head of the most civilized nation on the globe; with a popular influence passing down from the throne into all the homes of her subjects, like the sun in his sphere, her accouchments announced to the four winds, she has hitherto performed no function of a mother, except the absolutely inevitable bearing of her children, not only unrebuked by, but with the authority of the highest medical science in the kingdom. All physical connection of mother and child has ceased with birth. Without the rebuke, and with the sanction of the best medical science of her kingdom, she is set conspicuously to be, not a woman, in the sacred completeness of that function, but a matrix. And the nobility are to follow the exemplary queen, and all the mothers of Great Britain are to receive the boon of chloroform at the couch of birth, Lethe for Latona, down to the cellars of the manufacturing cities, where the animal functions of labor and reproduction of species (de-generation, for it cannot be called generation) is all that the highest civilization of cultured Christendom has left to humanity.

The Edinburgh Doctors of Divinity fought against Dr. Simpson's use of chloroform in obstetrics, with the Bible, and the Doctor of Medicine fought against them with the Bible. They quoted against him the denunciation of sorrow in childbirth for the woman in the third chapter of Genesis; and he quoted against them "the deep sleep which the Lord God caused to fall upon Adam," preparatory to the surgical operation of removing the rib, recorded in the second chapter of Genesis. They give a poor reason against him, and he as poor against them. They both show how readily men may prove from the letter of texts of scripture whatever they mean to believe and practice. While both parties are settling between them their foolish theological argument in re obstetrica, a simple man may take the liberty of asking them both to consider how it is, that while the Scriptures of the second and third chapters of Genesis remain just as they are, a strong, well-formed, healthy woman, who lives a life of temperate activity, brings forth children without sorrow, and is not under the curse? And while they are

considering this, a simple man may affirm the Scripture of the whole creation; namely this: that it lies in the free will of the human race, in a few generations of purity and temperance, in healthy conditions of life, to deliver all mothers from the present sorrow of birth, supposed to come of the perpetual theological curse in the third chapter of Genesis. Chloroform will not avoid, but confirm the sorrow, in some other and worse result, and form, to mother and offspring, as all kindred treatment of disorder has confirmed pain upon us. Alas for us, with theology for religion in the regeneration of the life of the soul, and physic and surgery for regeneration in the life of the body. What shall we do to escape Scylla and Charybdis, waiting for us on either side of this strait of life which we must all pass through? How long shall not the curse stand for us, thus, in the written scripture of a carnal religion, and the confirmatory and illustrative habit of a carnal life?

What are human bodies in the science of the doctor? We are cobbled like old shoes; patched like decayed houses; restored in our members like worn-out parts of machinery; hove down, like old ships for repair; cut into like apple-trees for borers; drenched like sewers; our cavities explored, and our viscera cleaned and put back to go again, like watches out of order; sounded like barrels, to know whether our lungs are full or getting empty of the liquor of life; burned with caustic and the iron; tapped and injected with copperas; poisoned with arsenic and prussic acid; exfoliated, like rotten crystals, with mercury; inocu-lated with the virus of kine, commingled with the humors of all human bodies it has flowed through, till the best frame of human health and organization must become penetrated with the worst, and so the highest circulations in the race brought down to an average with the worst, and all diseases of the race thrown into the common stock of a universal partnership; and, crowning the whole, this share in the average of all disease, made by law the condition of feeding at the public crib of knowledge in the common schools. We have come to believe in the virtue of virus and mineral poisons to protect us from disease and cure it, not in the abiding virtue of a life of inward and outward purity, in accord with the laws of our being. In our medical science, we take note only of second, and third, and fourth, and so on, to hundredth causes, not of first causes.

And to what a state has this all brought the organism of civilized man! The advertisements in our popular newspapers, ("the abstract and brief chronicle of the time,") of dentistry, of medicines, patent and common; of cures of diseases, secret and open; of mechanical operations upon bodies by morbid surgery, and the like-what an abstractwhat a chronicle-what a history. And this is what our medical practice brings us to, and where it leaves us. Its magazine of remedies is all in the same evil spheres. It has ever still a few more to resort to, but always "a few more of the same sort." The sphere of resort for medicine is no higher, but the steps of progression are always downward, from worse to worse. Here come ether and chloroform to us: not descended to us from above, but lifted up into the sphere of our life from beneath, the viler brothers of alcohol and opium succeeding to fill their places. Where will they leave us then, when they have done

their work in the human organism, and gone out of fashion. If the civilized body is such a thing now, what is it to become under the continuation of the same system? Is there a whole body of man and woman on the face of the globe out of the state of barbarism? Must civilized man pray for regenerative barbarism to come and remove his pain, and be the physician of the dilapidated elements of his body?

O, for the theory of disease which regards it as the product of an unclean spirit; which treats it dynamically, by power, restoring, reforming the vital power, and hence the frame and tissues of the body, which are emanations from the central vital power; rebuilding the builder, and by that rebuilding the house he lives in; renewing the life, and thence the organic form of life. The water-cure, now most effectually of all systems of pathological treatment, does this. It cures the desperate cases of the regular practice by heroic baptism and a clean diet. Mesmerism hints a still higher influence of life-power.

The original physicians of men were priests and prophets, treating disease as a visitation from God. Even Hippocrates advises, in treating a case of disease, to consider "how far it is of a divine nature or origin." The medicine man among our Indians, to-day, is priest and prophet. Their practice might be bad enough, but this theory of disease is the only possible true one. The same Scripture is for disease that is for affliction and trouble. "Affliction cometh not forth of the dust, neither doth trouble spring out of the ground." Disease, interpreted in the region of final causes for intelligent spirits, comes as a warning to man: comes to strive against man that he may be kept out of wrong: comes as a manifestation to man that he has trespassed upon the region of wrong; comes as a demon to keep with us there, and plague us till we go home into our place, and cast the demon out by vital power. The symptoms of disease are a proof that the vital forces are at work to expel the enemy. Disease is a spirit of disorder manifest in the flesh. But our popular accepted medical science treats disease as a thing in external nature, in the tissues of our bodies, and not in the habits of our bodies, which are always from within. We treat disease as a chemical substance; as an acid to be neutralized by an alkali, and the like. The doctor puts into a man's pocket a bottle of calcined magnesia, for the man to carry about with him, to correct the acid in his stomach, leaving hidden in the pocket of his being a perpetual generator of acids. Medicine uses our bodies for a chemical laboratory. Our pathology is based upon the laws of disease, not the laws of health. Our pathological examples are disorganizations. Our physicians are students of disordered nature, nature sick and sad, secondary nature, the perverted nature of man's invention, not the first nature of the great God's making. The learned doctor is he who has seen and read the most cases of disease a man deep in the lore of the pest-house and hospital: wise in rhubarb, senna, and purgative drugs. He is impregnated with these learnings even to his very clothes: his garments have the odor of all these wisdoms. He is knowing in morbid anatomy.

Sweet nature, fragrant nature, beautiful nature, clean nature, parental, consoling, healing nature, give us thy streams to solve and wash us from our medicines and our diseases, give us to follow what is left of thy in

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stincts of cure, and for the rest, let us trust for renewal to a regenerated inward and outward life.

ways

If for a hundred years to come, civilized man would take no more medicine, then civilized man might, perhaps, give to physicians something like a specimen of a natural body to study, even though all the other of our daily life should remain as now. But as it is now, in this century of the era of medicine, the physician of pathology is studying in the diseases of the body, the mistakes of medicine, medicinal not natural diseases. The pathology of our medicine is made out of its own facts, not nature's. It sees its own face everywhere, when it would make a diagnosis of nature in sick bodies. It grows, and must grow inevitably worse and worse. It breeds in and in. It is degenerating, and degenerating, and degenerating endlessly, like the result of intermarriages in the same family. Where is the end?

Here come ether and chloroform in this downward series. They are the latest inventions of a hopeless, helpless, insane science, without faith in the spiritual law; administering to man as a body, and not as a soul; or if not regarding him as quite fallen down so low as that, then, at the highest, as a body having a soul in it, holding the soul as a cage holds a bird, or band-box a bonnet, or a stable a horse, and not as a mysterious compact of a soul and body, the body answering to the soul, in the soul's likeness, representing its vital power in every organ, built by the vital powers of the soul, at its incarnation in the womb of the sacred mother, and perpetually renewed by the soul, after birth, in the perpetual flux of the substance of life. Body is a secretion of the soul out of matter.

But the doctors tell us pain is dead now. The most eminent surgeon of Boston, in his book at the head of this paper, thus thanks the Creator of the universe for the gift of ether:

"While we would pay a willing and liberal tribute to the individual who has been made the instrument of this discovery, we should look higher for its author, and elevate our fervent attributions of praise and thanksgiving to Him who has been pleased, from the rich treasures of His goodness, to confer so wonderful a gift on our generation."

Pagan piety believed that dreams came from God. "From Jove comes the dream," said old Homer. Hebrew and Christian have had the same belief. And there is a truth in the belief; but this truth only-that the dreams which come to us from God, can only come to us through the medium of our being, and they are seen by us, and heard by us, and apprehended by us, only through the atmosphere of our own being. That atmosphere must be divinely clear, that we may rightly see God's messengers to us, and report their message truly, and paint them in their own image and likeness. All revelations partake thus of the medium. through which they come. As is the revealer, so will the revelation be. According to the sight which a man has of God's universe through his own personal being, so will his theory of God's universe be. The eminent surgeon's view of the gift of ether and chloroform is taken through the thick and clouded atmosphere of his profession. His attributions of praise and thanksgiving are to be regarded as having no more than the professional measure of wisdom and authority. Warmth and since