Earlier text: Baal Worship and Worldly CompromiseThe Popes and the Printers.
ABOUT 1525 A. D. there began a remarkable contest between the Romish Church and the Bible—between the printers and the popes. For many centuries the Scriptures had been hidden in a dead language, guarded from the public eye by the anathemas of the priests, and so costly in manuscript form as to be accessible only to the wealthy. A Bible cost as much as a landed estate; the greatest universities, the richest monasteries, could scarcely purchase a single copy. Its language and its doctrines had long been forgotten by the people, and in their place the intellect of the Middle Ages had been fed upon extravagant legends and monkish visions, the fancies of idle priests, the fables of the unscrupulous. The wonders worked by a favorite image, the virtues of a relic, the dreams of a dull abbot or a fanatical monk, had supplanted the modest teachings of Peter and the narrative of Luke. Men saw before them only the imposing fabric of the Church of Rome, claiming supremacy over the conscience and the reason, pardoning sins, determining doctrines, and had long ceased to remember that there was a Redeemer, a Bible, even a God. A practical atheism followed. The pope was often a skeptic, except as to his own right to rule. The church and the monasteries teemed with the vices depicted by Rabelais and Erasmus. Then, in the close of the fifteenth century, a flood of light was poured upon mankind. The new art of printing sprung into sudden maturity, and great numbers of Bibles were scattered among the people. They were sought for with an avidity, studied with an eagerness, received with an undoubting faith, such as no later age has witnessed. Arrayed in the charm of entrancing novelty, the simple story of the gospels and the noble morals of the epistles, translated for the first time into the common dialects, descended as if newly written by the pen of angels upon the minds of men. Every honest intellect was at once struck with the strange discrepancy between the teaching of the sacred volume and that of the Church of Rome. No religion, indeed, seemed less consistent with itself than that of mediæval Romanism. The Mohammedan of the fifteenth century still clung with tenacity to the minute requirements of the Koran; the Jew obeyed in every particular the injunctions of the decalogue; the Greeks and Romans had suffered few alterations in the rituals of Jupiter and Diana. But it was found, upon the slightest inspection, that there was no authority for the Romish innovations in any portion of the Scriptures. There was no purgatory, no mass, no papal supremacy, no monasteries, no relics working miracles, no images, no indulgences to be found in the book that contained the teachings of Christ and his apostles. The inference was at once everywhere drawn that the theories of the Roman Church were founded upon imposture; and when, at the same time, the shameless lives of its priests and popes were brought before the public eye by satirists and preachers, its gross corruption was believed to be the necessary result of its want of truthfulness; its cruelty and violence seemed the offspring of its unhallowed sensuality and pride. The Bible alone could now satisfy the active intellect of France; the Bible awoke anew the simple church of the apostolic age. To the Bible the popes at once declared a deathless hostility. To read the Scriptures was in their eyes the grossest of crimes; for they confessed by their acts that he who read must cease to be a Romanist. Not murder, robbery, nor any other offense was punished with such dreadful severity. The tongues of the gentle criminals were usually cut out; they were racked until their limbs parted; they were then forced to mount a cart, and were491 jolted over rough streets, in agony, to the stake. Here they were burned amidst the jeers of the priests and the populace. Yet the Bible sustained them in their hour of trial, and they died ever with hymns of exultation. Great wars were undertaken to drive the sacred volume from schools and colleges. The Inquisition was invested with new terrors, and was forced upon France and Holland by papal armies. The Jesuits were everywhere distinguished by their hatred for the Bible. In the Netherlands they led the persecutions of Alva and Philip II.; they rejoiced with a dreadful joy when Antwerp, Bruges, and Ghent, the fairest cities of the working-men, were reduced to pauperism and ruin by the Spanish arms; for the Bible had perished with its defenders. "There are above forty thousand Protestants in this town," wrote Sir Thomas Gresham from Antwerp in 1566, "which will die rather than that the word of God shall be put to silence." A few years later their heroic resolution had been fulfilled; they had nearly all perished by famine, disease, and the sword of Alva. To burn Bibles was the favorite employment of zealous Catholics. Wherever they were found the heretical volumes were destroyed by active inquisitors, and thousands of Bibles and Testaments perished in every part of France. Yet the fertile press soon renewed the abundant fruit, and the skillful printers of Germany and Switzerland poured forth an incessant stream of French, Dutch, and English Bibles, besides an infinite number of tracts and treatises by eminent reformers. The demand for these books could never be sufficiently supplied. At Nuremberg, Mentz, and Strasburg there was an eager struggle for Luther's smallest pamphlets. Of his catechism one hundred thousand were sold. The sheets of his tracts, often wet from the press, were hidden under the purchasers' cloaks and passed from shop to shop. The most hated and the most feared of all the agents of reform, in this remarkable period, by priest and pope, was the humble colporter or Bible-seller. Laden with his little pack of Bibles, Testaments, and Protestant treatises, the godly merchant made his way from Antwerp or Geneva into the heart of France, and, beneath the hot summer sun or in the snows of winter, pursued with patient toil his dangerous traffic. He knew that if detected he must die; he felt that the keen eyes of inquisitors and priests were everywhere watching for his coming. Yet, often disguised as a peddler of ribbons and trinkets, he made his way into the castles of the nobles or the homes of the working-men, and cautiously exposed his forbidden wares. They were bought with eagerness, and read by noble and peasant. But not seldom the daring missionary was discovered and punished; his little stock of Bibles was dragged forth and burned by rejoicing priests, and the humble Bible-seller was himself sacrificed, in fearful tortures, to the dreadful deity at Rome. Between the printers and the popes the war now began that has never ceased. The clank of the printing-press had to the ears of the Italian priesthood an ominous sound. "We must destroy printing," said an English vicar, "or it will destroy us." The Sorbonne of Paris denounced the printers in 1534, and burned twenty of them and one woman, within six months. A printer of the Rue Saint Jacques was condemned for publishing Luther's works; a book-seller was burned for having sold them. At last the Sorbonne, the council of the papal faction, in 1535, obtained a decree from the king for the total suppression of printing. Robert Stephens was one of the most eminent printers and scholars of the age. From his accurate press at Paris had issued Latin Bibles and Testaments of singular excellence and beauty. But he was a Huguenot, and even the favor and protection of the king and the court could not shield him from the rage of the Sorbonne. It was discovered that in the notes to his Latin Bible of 1545 he had introduced heretical doctrines. He was persecuted by the Faculty of Theology, and fled from France to escape the stake. His contemporary, the poet, printer, and scholar, Dolet, was burned for atheism, in 1546. Yet the bold printers in Protestant Geneva, Germany, and the Low Countries defied the rage of popes and inquisitors, and still poured forth an increasing tide of Protestant tracts and Bibles. The press waged a ruthless war upon the antichrist at Rome. It founded the republic of Holland, the central fount of modern freedom, a reformed England and the North. It filled the common schools with Bibles, and instructed nations in the humanizing lessons of history. From age to age it has never ceased to inflict deadly wounds upon the papacy; until at length even Italy and Spain have been rescued from the grasp of the Inquisition and the Jesuits, and have proclaimed the freedom of the press. In the city of Rome alone, under the tyranny of an infallible pope, the printer lay chained at the mercy of his ancient adversary until a recent period; from the dominions of Pius IX., the Protestant Bible, the source of modern civilization, was excluded by penalties scarcely less severe than those imposed by Pius V. And as once more the Italian priests prepare to renew their warfare against the printing-press and the Bible in the cities of free America, they will encounter, though with new arts and new arms, their successful adversary of the Old World. The printer once more defies the pope. He points to the ashes of his martyrs, scattered in the waters of the Seine or the Scheldt in the sixteenth century; to the prisons of Bologna or of Rome, so lately filled with the dying advocates of a free press in the nineteenth; to the crimes of Pius IX., no less than those of Pius V., as his gauge of battle. More than thirty years of ceaseless persecution, filled with scenes of horror, of flourishing seats of industry sacked and blighted, of holy men and women martyred with incredible sufferings, of dreadful atrocities perpetrated in every town and village by the emissaries of the popes, had passed over the patient Huguenots before they resolved to take up arms in self-defense. Their gentle pastors, with persistent magnanimity, inculcated theories of non-resistance. Calvin himself, rigid and severe, still urged upon them obedience to their merciless kings. He was content to meet the savage barbarism of the Inquisition with spiritual arms. From his stronghold at Geneva, he organized his Bible societies, and poured an incessant stream of reformed literature over every part of France. He cheered the martyrs with austere exhortations; his Bible-sellers were seen in every secluded path and by-way, stealing with fearless faith from congregation to congregation; his presses at Geneva were never idle; his "institutes" were scattered widely over his native land. During this period of suffering, the Huguenots continued to increase in numbers. Yet their congregations were often forced to meet in caves and forests, and to chant in subdued tones their sacred songs, lest their persecutors might break in upon them with fire and sword. Often the pious assembly was discovered in its most secret retreat, and men, women, and children were massacred by hordes of priests and brigands.—Historical Studies. Carson City, Nevada.
By Editor
THE following brief statement of the result of the tent work this summer in Nevada, we take from a private letter written by Elder Briggs to an employe in this office:— "The Lord's work here moves forward prosperously. Thirty have signed the covenant. We shall probably buy a small house to meet in, and we trust the company here will be left in good working order. Several of these new converts have made great sacrifices for the truth's sake. One man who has heretofore worked for $35 a week, has left that position, and is working for $9 a week, in order to keep the Lord's Sabbath. Five of those who have signed the covenant are, or have been, school teachers. How joyful those will be, who have kept the truth, even though it has been at a great sacrifice." "Partners in the Concern."
By Earl Cairns
IN Belfast there was a little boy, a chimney-sweep. He happened to be attracted by missions, and dropped in a mission box a sum not inconsiderable for him—the sum of two pence. One afternoon a friend of the boy's met him going along the street in an unusual condition, for his face and his hands were washed and he was dressed in his best clothes. And the boy who was his friend said to him, "Halloa! where are you going?" "Oh!" he said, "I am going to a mission meeting." "What!" he said, "going to a missionary meeting? What are you going to a missionary meeting for?" "Well," the sweep said, "you see I have become a sort of partner in the concern, and I am going to see how the business is getting on." Well, now, that is what I want. Let us be partners in the concern, and let us see how the business is getting on. Do not let us drop our sovereign or our shilling on the plate, and then wash our hands of it till some subsequent occasion, when we will repeat that process. Do not let us take leave of the missionary and never think more about him. Let us, indeed, be partners in the great work in which we are engaged, and let us know and remember that to us is given that marvelous honor, not merely of serving, but also of being partners with our great Master, who wills that all men should be saved and should come to the knowledge of the truth. The New York City Midnight Mission.
WHILE the city reader is enjoying his sound sleep at night,—and undisturbedly so, till, perhaps, in his lighter slumbers he catches a refrain from the bird orchestra, just as the auroral light is flushing the eastern sky,—a mighty work is going on about him. At eight o'clock in the evening services are held in the Florence, Cremorne, Women's Night, and other missions. Exhortations are made, hymns sung, and poor sinners are brought to Christ. And this happens not now and then, but every night. At half-past ten o'clock the services—and there is never one that does not bring forth testimony to a saving gospel—are brought to a close, and then the night work commences. From eleven o'clock till the morning is proclaimed by the cry of the newsboys with the morning papers, evangelists walk the streets on their errands of mercy. Here a poor fallen woman—not one but a dozen of them—are stopped, spoken to, urged to reform, and then a card is given them giving the address of the mission with the remark, "Whenever you get in trouble or want to change your life come and see us." In this way the two classes of night walkers come to know each other. Nor is it strange to know that these evangelists are always treated with respect. No word of scoffing is ever addressed to them, and not only so, but they can enter and are welcome to the dives and vile saloons where they labor to recover the lost sheep. It is a beautiful work, this work of the midnight missions. It is a constant, never-ceasing work, and great is the sum of the good which it is doing. There is a dainty Christianity which knows nothing of this work; which rather skips an account of it in the daily papers, and only wants to learn and read about "a clean Christianity." "A clean Christianity," indeed! As if the Master came to save the refined, the righteous, the cultured, and did not stoop to the lowly, take sinning women by the hand, and say, "Go and sin no more." There is nothing like the blessedness of uplifting Christianity, which, like the Master, goes forth to seek and to save those who are lost. It is in such work that the power of a living gospel is seen, and it is such work that puts to shame the daintier work sometimes affected by the over-refined, who are careful for nothing so much as an irreproachable rhetoric, a polished exterior, and a "clean Christianity."—Christian at Work. Receive Christ With All Your Heart
By John Flavel
RECEIVE Christ with all your heart. As there is nothing in Christ that may be refused, so there is nothing in you from which he must be excluded. Keep Your Eyes on the Mark
A MAN running a race looks not at the admiring witnesses, but only at the mark. Her One Talent.
By Margaret E. Sangster
SHE is neither beautiful, graceful, nor specially accomplished. She is past the first rose-bloom of early youth, and her means is limited. Of the higher education, such as girls receive now at Wellesley and Vassar, she knows nothing, for, having been a delicate child, she studied in a desultory fashion with her father at home, picking up such crumbs of learning as fell from her brothers' table, when they were preparing for college. Ten years ago, when she was married to Tom Dean, everybody said it was a wonder that Tom had fancied that plain little thing—Tom, who had only to choose, and he might have had the loveliest bride in three townships. "What a pity," thought the wiseacres, "that young men will be in such haste! The other Dean boys have married so well, too!" Ten years ago Lottie Dean realized that she was extremely unlike her brilliant husband. She did not, in fact, do herself justice, in her modest self-deprecation. She knew she had not Leila's charm of manner; that when Gertrude, with her rare coloring and starry eyes, came into the drawing-room, she herself grew shadowy and pale by contrast; and when Margaret, with her culture and wide, keen intelligence, was present, she, silent little Lottie, was more than ever a timid mouse in the corner. Yes, Lottie concluded, George and Harold and Louis had all more reason to be proud of their wives than Tom had to boast of his; yet here the brown eyes would grow soft and misty, and the sweet look on the sallow face well-nigh transfigure it; she loved Tom, and Tom loved her, and she would try, please God, to make him happy. Ten years ago Lottie Dean had bemoaned to herself her lack in any striking peculiarity, any distinctive talent. "Some have so many," she thought; "I have not even one. Not one to fold away in a napkin, and take out, now and then, to look at. There never in this world was a creature so stupid as I." Meanwhile, distressing as was the thought of her lack of ability and attainment whenever she dwelt upon it, she did not often sit down and brood over it sadly. "There's one comfort, I can keep house tolerably," she whispered to herself, as she planned the delicate, dainty meals, abundant, well cooked, and well served; or as she arranged the homelike apartments, where no speck of dust or grimy spot was ever suffered to remain, but which still were not aggressively and forbiddingly clean—which invited a tired man to rest, and were not too fine to be littered with books and papers, if it pleased him to bring work home from the office, and write in the evening, with the little wife sitting by, her knitting or fancy-work in her hands. Margaret, Gertrude, and Leila all had more trouble in the home management than Lottie had, for Lottie had the gift for guiding the house without friction, and attaching her warm-hearted Irish girl to her with the grappling-hooks of real affection. And this is, in these days, a gift to be grateful for. Tom observed one day, as he tucked his wife's little hand under his arm, on their way to a concert:— "There's one talent you have, my darling, beyond any one else in the world; it's the talent of having time enough for everything." The question of the talent had often come up between them, and was almost the only one on which they had a decided difference of opinion. So sure was the husband that Lottie was endowed beyond most of her sex, that he regarded her diffidence as a positive merit, and surveyed her with ever-increasing satisfaction, while, from the vantage-ground of a home so entirely his ideal that he accepted it as though it were a suburb of paradise, which by no possibility could do aught except grow constantly more beautiful, he went forth to the competitions of life, steadily successful in all his enterprises. Society, observing that each year was bringing some new honor to Tom Dean, was pleased to see its predictions fulfilled, regretted that he had not the knack of making money faster, but admitted that a man couldn't have everything, and still held firmly to its early opinion—that he would have risen higher with a more aspiring wife to help him. Society was mistaken. The quiet wife, who had time to love him, to share his hopes, listen to his views, consult with him as to his plans, and make his life supremely happy, was an element in his success which counted more largely than even the husband knew. For good husbands, being only human after all, are very apt to take good wives for granted, and it is not often in this world that any truly unselfish person gets all the credit to which he or she is entitled. Tom was better than the average of his sex. He had characterized Lottie's talent happily, and definitely, too, when he said she always had time for everything. It is rarer than you may imagine, unless you have given your attention to it, to find in this hurrying world a being of the elect few, who is at work without haste, but with an air of repose; who can pause in any engagement to listen to another's story of gladness or of sorrow, and who has a heart touched to so responsive a key that sympathy in a friend's good fortune is as ready as pity for a friend's calamity. Then, too, to give freely of your best, without everlastingly boasting of the matter; to be kind and merry and cheerful, without making yourself the pivot of every conversation, and furtively seeking compliments; to please as a flower does, unconsciously; the power to be sweet, without carrying round a label marked suggestively—all this demands spiritual grace of a high order; and this Lottie possessed. Granting that a woman begins life in her girlhood on this plane, and in her wedded life she does not lower her standard, she must of necessity develop into something stronger, better equipped, and every way more charming in middle life than she was in the immaturity. If, starting from her own home, she fulfills every obligation there, blithely and fully, not like a drudge, but gaily, she gradually widens the circle of her influence. She will, by degrees, become a social power. This has come to pass in the case of my friend. I happened into her home one Thursday evening, lately, and as I was admitted I heard the hum of fresh, girlish voices, and saw the table in the sitting-room covered with pretty bits of feminine work. "Lottie's Sunday-school class," I said to myself, and presently I was in the midst of the bright circle. No, it was not her class; not, at least, the class I was accustomed to seeing round her, with eyes intent and heads bent eagerly forward, while she unfolded the lesson. She presented me to the young ladies, and I gathered, not from anything in her manner, nor in theirs, but from scraps in the conversation, that they were saleswomen in the neighboring stores, just around the corner from Lottie's quiet home, and that three or four worked in factories down town. They were much interested in some stitches she was teaching them, and when by and by she went to the piano, played and sang, they ceased talking and listened in well-bred silence, and with what looked like intelligent pleasure. After a while they had a little treat of cake and fruit, and at ten o'clock they said good-night to their hostess and each other, and went home. "Lottie Dean, will you explain this proceeding?" said I, gravely. "There is nothing to explain, dear. It's only a happening. I was shopping in R's one day, and I couldn't help seeing how pale and fagged out those poor girls were. I made acquaintance with one or two, asked them here, and they invited the others. The thing has grown. It does not trouble Tom, for I have them only on evenings when he has to be out, and I am making my pretty house of use to girls who haven't anything very pleasant to go home to at night. And," pursued Lottie, shyly, but with a brave uplifting of the eyes, "you know I always did think it was at least as Christian a work to keep young girls from temptation as to save the poor remnant of their ruined lives when once they had fallen." With which sentiment I fully agree. "Mrs. Dean cannot be induced to take part in our temperance work," had been said to me of Lottie, only a few days earlier, and I had replied that perhaps, though she took no large share in such a reform, she was in reality doing her part. I knew that Tom would be annoyed to have his wife in any way prominent or conspicuous before the public, and that Lottie was wise enough to respect his feeling in this matter. But here she was, very unobtrusively doing much truer and more efficient service than many a woman eloquent in speech and "gifted" in prayer. Saying nothing about it, too! It was not Lottie's way to sound a trumpet before her. Altogether, when I think of the sick-beds by which this little woman sits, the heartaches she soothes, the confidences of which she is the trusted recipient, the happy home life which is hers, and the good she is doing silently, I am quite sure her one talent is bearing interest for the Master.—Margaret E. Sangster, in Christian Union. BLEST be the tongue that speaks no ill,
Whose words are always true,
That keeps the law of kindness still,
Whatever others do. Blest be the ears that will not hear
Detraction's envious tale;
'Tis only through the list'ning ear
That falsehood can prevail. Blest be the heart that knows no guile,
That feels no wish unkind,
Forgetting provocation, while
Good deeds are kept in mind. Blest be the hands that toil to aid
The great world's ceaseless need—
The hands that never are afraid
To do a kindly deed. —Sel. Warm-Hearted Hospitality.
By Christie Irving
To go into the house of a friend you have not seen for some time and have her meet you with cheery face and commence to untie your bonnet strings before she has got through saying, "How d'e do," and "I am so glad to see you," insisting you are going to stay to tea and part of the evening, supplementing it with, "I haven't a girl, mine has been gone for a week, but you'll have a chance to have one of my suppers, that's all," is proof positive that old-time hospitality isn't dying out, for all so many claim it is. It is far more resting to have such a visit than one you are invited purposely for, and be left in state in the parlor to amuse yourself with the albums, cards, and photographs, while your hostess, too careful for the things that perish, spends most of the time in getting the table in the order she wants it. We all take pride of some kind in our homes; and we all like to be found at our best, I am sure, but, after all, isn't the warm-hearted reception worth more to us than anything else? —Christie Irving. "Be not forgetful to entertain strangers." THROW open the window, and fasten it there;
Fling the curtain aside, and the blind;
And give a free entrance to heaven's pure air;
'Tis the life and the health of mankind. Are you fond of coughs, colds, dyspepsia, and rheums,
Of headaches, and fevers, and chills;
Of bitters, hot-drops, and medicine fumes,
And bleeding, and blisters, and pills? Then be sure when you sleep that all air is shut out;
Place, too, a warm brick at your feet;
Put a bandage of flannel your neck quite about,
And cover your head with a sheet. But would you avoid all forms of disease
Then haste to the fresh open air,
Where your cheeks may kindly be fanned by the beeze;
'Twill make you well, happy, and fair. Then open the window and fasten it there;
Fling the curtain aside, and the blind;
And give free admission to heaven's pure air;
'Tis life, light, and joy to mankind. —Sel. What Is Your Bible to You?
By Hope Ledyard
A LITTLE family incident has made me put this question to different friends. Every mother has a Bible; but what is it to her? to her children? Is that particular copy of God's word associated peculiarly in the children's minds with pleasant twilight talks; or quiet bed-time moments, when mamma, after listening patiently to their complaints or hopes or plans, after telling them "a real sweet story," bends her head over her most precious volume, and the children listen quietly "because mamma loves it so," if for no higher reason? I happened of late to be in a home where a mother lost her Bible. She had hurried her children a little the evening before, and kissed them good-night with her Bible in her hand, going to help tell the poor and destitute of One who "for our sakes became poor." The next morning, as soon as her quiet time had come, that precious half-hour when, beds made and rooms dusted, mamma felt she had a right to feast herself upon the "pure milk of the word," my friend missed her Bible. It was holiday season, and soon every boy and girl was engaged in a search for it. Blossom, after looking about the sitting-room, climbed into her mother's lap and said, consolingly, "Never mind, mamma, it's God's book, and he won't lose it." Diligent search was made, but for three days not a trace could be found of the precious volume. Meanwhile, Will, the oldest boy, brought his Oxford Bible. He looked shamefaced enough as he inwardly contrasted its freshness, though he had had it for five years, with his mother's marked and worn copy. "Here's mine, mother," he said. "I'd be glad if you'd mark it up just as if it were your own." Another child remarked, "It's an awful sad New Year's, for mamma's lost her Bible." I am glad to say the treasure was found at last; but in how many homes would the mislaying, or even loss, of the mother's Bible be such an event? What is your Bible to you? I repeat it, that you may consider the question. Do you know its pages as you know the faces of your children, or your dear ones? Do verses here and there recall how God spoke to you at this or that? Is your whole life, in short, associated with your Bible? But perhaps you will say, "I know this ought to be, but to me the Bible is dull and uninteresting. The beautiful parts are so familiar they have lost their flavor, while many portions are perfectly unintelligible to me." Let me tell you how to regard it differently, so you will love it. Look at it as you do at your offspring—as yours. There are very few people who love all children, but every one is interested in his own. So with your Bible. Read it as a personal message to you from your personal Friend, and it becomes a new book. Suppose, worried and tired, you open its pages to the fourteenth chapter of John, and read, "Let not your heart be troubled," and you hear the message as if spoken to you. You are troubled, and here is a loving Friend who lifts your face up toward Heaven and says, "Believe in me." But you can't believe? Then tell him so; he says, "Come," over and over again. Now will you not try to value your Bible more? Take this gift to the Giver that he may show you how to use it, and your Bible shall be the book of books to you—the great treasure among all your possessions.—Hope Ledyard, in the Congregationalist. Family Comfort and Child Training
The daily comfort of the family, and the mental and moral training of the children, are of more importance than frosted fruit-cake for company, or embroidered pillow-shams and mantel lambrequins in the guest-chamber. Tempting Back a Lost Appetite
A DAINTY surprise will often tempt back a lost or wandering appetite. "It doesn't hurt me," is the rejoinder most frequently made when individuals are remonstrated with regarding the use of tea, tobacco, or liquor, or respecting the continuance of any other hurtful practice. The drunkard says, "Liquor does not hurt me." Says the tobacco-user, "Tobacco does me no harm." Says the young lady who eats mince-pie and pickles, mustard and pepper-sauce, rich pastry and confectionery, visits theaters, attends fashionable parties, and indulges in fashionable suppers, when remonstrated with for the reckless manner in which she squanders her health, "Oh, it's so charming, and it doesn't hurt me." It is easy enough for all these persons to see that the things they do are fatally injurious to other people, though they will not admit any such influence in their own cases. The drunkard sees every day of his life the ruin to body and soul, for both this world and the next, which liquor works; and he calls his chum a fool for getting drunk and wasting his time as well as his health. The young lady sees many of her young lady friends dropping one after another into early graves, while others survive for a time only to mope out a miserable existence, with ruined constitutions—health, beauty, and happiness sacrificed at the shrine of fashion; yet she still persists that the commission of the very same follies does her no harm. So do most of us, in one way or another, every day of our lives, commit the most absurd and inconsistent actions. Notwithstanding the spirit is willing to obey the dictates of reason and common sense, the flesh is weak, and we are continually yielding to habit and depraved desires. One of the best lessons which any human being can learn is that in most particulars he is, but a counterpart of every other member of the human family; that he is amenable to the same laws as his fellows. Nature never grants any indulgences, and never pardons any infraction of her laws. She is an inexorable judge, and demands the full expiation of every transgression of her regulations, no matter who the culprit may be, high or low, rich or poor, king or peasant.—Good Health. Liquor Dealers and Prohibition
THERE are some good omens; the liquor dealers are getting tender-hearted; they are indulging in veritable lachrymais over the suffering endured in Kansas and Iowa by those whose "property"—consisting of breweries and saloons—has been ruined by the prohibitory laws. Let them weep; perhaps they may yet become so tender as to pity the wives and children whom they have beggared by their accursed traffic.—Pacific Health Journal. Camphor Against Mosquitoes
The fumes of burning camphor will drive away mosquitoes. Stingy or Lazy People Make Poor Cooks
STINGY or lazy people never make good cooks. The Table, and Moral Character.
By Mrs. M. M. Jones
THE table! how vast an influence it exerts on human life and character; how much of the weal or woe of humanity clusters around it! In determining our physical, mental, and moral conditions, no other one thing in all the material universe has so vast a power as that which we take daily in the shape of food and drink. Much, very much, of the sickness, suffering, and premature death in the world; much of its vice, immorality, and crime, can, if traced to its starting-point, be found to originate here. Anxious days and sleepless nights are spent by parents in their earnest endeavors to devise some means to subdue the peevishness and fretfulness, the obstinacy or the immorality, of their children, only to find, alas! their admonitions unheeded, their agonizing prayers of no avail; they little dreaming that the causes of this perverseness lie, in a great measure, within their own control; that these unhappy mental and moral manifestations are caused by a disordered condition of the bodily functions, produced by the improper kinds and quantities of food which they have allowed them to eat. That abnormal conditions of the body never exist without more or less influencing the mind, no arguments are needed to prove. Take, for instance, the drunkard while under the dominion of alcohol. Of what avail are his own resolutions, or the prayers, the tears, the earnest entreaties of friends, to stay the fierce, ungovernable passions which rage within him, or to rouse him from the dull, leaden stupor into which the demon of drink often plunges its victims? What are moral influences then? So many "wisps of straw" to bind the Samson of evil. But remove the cause, then your appeals to his better nature may be of some avail; while it remains, never. It is but speaking the simple truth to say that fully one-half the evil and misery that exist in the world have their origin in improper dietetic habits. The starting-point of intemperance, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, is in the stimulating or gross food and drink received at a fond mother's table in infancy and boyhood, producing, in time, a craving for stronger stimulus, found at last in the intoxicating cup. And to that table, too, may be traced the origin of a majority of the countless diseases which people our cemeteries, and make this bright world of ours really a "vale of tears." All over the land are scattered, by hundreds and thousands, wretched invalids—poor, miserable dyspeptics, to whom life is a burden, and existence a bane—consumptives, lingering with one foot in the grave, who to-day might have been doing the work of strong and earnest men and women, had they and their parents but realized the truth of this. And to too many of them, years and years, yea, a life-time of earnest effort in the "better way," are barely sufficient to undo the wrong which need never have existed. Health reform does not seek to curtail the gustatory pleasures of the table, but rather to enhance them. No drunkard can enjoy his glass of brandy as the teetotaler does his cup of clear, cold, sparkling water. So, those who live upon rich and stimulating food are really losers, instead of gainers, in the pleasures of the table. The spices, condiments, and seasonings, universally employed, so far destroy the natural flavor of food that the taste of persons habitually accustomed to their use, becomes so perverted that they can no more detect the real delicate flavor of the food itself than the drunkard can appreciate the excellence of pure water; and their enjoyment is not to be compared in steady, lasting endurance to that of those who live upon a truly hygienic diet, as all who have tried it thoroughly can testify.—Mrs. M. M. Jones.