tronomy of the savage, they have brought the art of cookery to such
an excess of luxury as to enervate society by merely factitious
appetites. In the formation of habits of life, social intercourse and
amusements adapted to a refined state, they have introduced many things
at war with the healthful development of both body and mind. The manly
exercises of swimming, skating, riding, hunting, ball playing; the
bracing walk in storm and sunshine; the free ramble over hill and dale,
all adapted to develop an independent, self-relying character; with the
occasional reunion where wit, science, healthful industry and serene
piety shed their benedictions; associating that which is free and bold
with the refined and sacred; all these are, in many cases, displaced by
frivolous and less healthful excitements. Our girls and boys,
prematurely exalted into young gentlemen and ladies, are tutored by
dancing masters; their manners disciplined into an artificial stiffness;
and the free developments of an open nature formed under the genial
influence of truly polite parents--the finest discipline in the
world--arrested by the strictures of a purely conventional regimen, in
which the laws of health and the higher spiritual life seem never to
have been consulted.

With such a physical training, associated with a corresponding education
of the mind and heart, they are ripe for the customs and fashions of
life in harmony therewith; and totally averse to the purer, manlier and
nobler duties and pleasures of a better state of society. To dress and
exhibit themselves; to crowd the saloon of every foreign trifler, who,
under the abused name of art, and for the sake of gold, seeks to
minister to us those meretricious excitements which associate themselves
with declining states and artificial forms of life; to waste the most
precious hours of night, set apart by the God of nature for repose, in
dancing, eating, drinking, and revelry, follow naturally enough upon
such training. Then in the rear, come disease of body and mind, broken
constitutions and broken hearts; and last of all, with grim majesty,
death, prematurely summoned, avenges this violation of the laws of
nature upon the miserable victims, and quenches the glare of this
brilliant day in the darkness of the tomb. How utterly different is such
training and such modes of life consequent upon it, from those which are
dictated by a thorough understanding of our nature and the great
purposes o