thesis
must be a culture of the flesh, and not of the spirit. It is the
culture of materialism, not of Christianity. Between modern materialism
and the cultivated heathenism of the ancient Greeks the difference is
not worth the naming. "To assume the existence of a soul," says Vogt,
"which uses the brain as an instrument with which to work as it
pleases, is utter nonsense. Physiology distinctly and categorically
pronounces against any individual immortality, and against all ideas
which are connected with a figment of a separate existence of the
soul." "Man," says Moleschott, "is produced from wind and ashes. The
action of vegetable life called him into existence.... Thought consists
in the motion of matter, it is a translocation of the cerebral
substance; without phosphorus there can be no thought; and consciousness
itself is nothing but an attribute of matter." This deification of the
flesh, this "gospel of dirt," makes man consist simply of what he eats.
The missionaries of this heathen gospel have no need to address the
reason of men; only feed them on the right kind of food and their
regeneration is accomplished! Materialism is a religion of the flesh, a
deification of matter; its laver of regeneration is the chemist's
retort; its new birth, phosphorus! Give the brain plenty of phosphorus
by high living, and you develop the _soul_ of materialism! Yet the
heralds of this soulless gospel talk flippantly about culture!

Man's fall was due to an attempt to acquire knowledge at the expense of
heart culture. Here, amid the bowers of "paradise lost" is found the
root of all false culture, and from that root the world has ever been
filled with a noxious growth. True culture consists in a correction of
the process which

"Brought death into the world,
And all our woe."

Man in his spiritual nature must be educated back to the divine image
from which he fell. No culture comprehending less than this has ever
proved a permanent blessing to the race. The highest culture hitherto
attained apart from Christianity was incapable of saving its devotees
from ruin. Greece and Rome were never more cultured, in a popular
sense, than when they began to go down in death. Materialistic culture
was their winding-sheet, and "A Religion of the Flesh" should be their
epitaph. As Christlieb has truly said: "Wherever civilization is not
made to rest on the basis of moral and religious truth it can not
attain to any permanent existence