s,
should be incorporated into education, into social work, into church
work, becoming thus a part of civilization's normal point of view.

Mental hygiene cannot survive conscious violation of the fundamental
laws of medicine and religion. The alliance of medicine and religion
will prove utterly futile unless habits of living and of thinking are
inculcated that conform to nature's law of self-preservation and to
God's law of brotherly love. Self-centered religion, like self-centered
medicine, destroys both body and soul.

FOOTNOTES:

[17] The alliance of mental hygiene, medicine, and religion is discussed
in the Emmanuel Church book, _Religion and Medicine; the Moral Control
of Nervous Disorders_; also in its bulletins, _Religion and Medicine_.

CHAPTER XLI

"A NATURAL LAW IS AS SACRED AS A MORAL PRINCIPLE"

When a grammar-school boy I learned from the game "Quotations" that
Louis Agassiz, scientist, had written the sentence with which I
introduce a final appeal for living that will permit physical and civic
efficiency. Agassiz has been called "America's greatest educator," and
again "the finest specimen yet discovered of the genus _homo_, of the
species _intelligens_." The story of his long life as teacher of
teachers reads like a romance. But among his gifts to education and
citizenship none can be made to mean more than the simple proposition
that natural law is as sacred as a moral principle. All who remember
this "beatitude" will be helped to solve many perplexing problems of
dress, diet, play, education, philanthropy, morals, and civics.

Reverence for the natural carries with it a distaste for the unnatural.
Those who obey natural law soon come to regard its violation as a
nuisance when not immoral. On the other hand, compromise with the
unnatural, like compromise with vice, quickly leads first to toleration
and thence to interest and practice. Therefore the importance of giving
children Agassiz's conception of the sacredness of the laws that govern
the human body. A passion for the natural is a strong foundation for
habits of health and a priceless possession for one who wishes to know
morality in its highest sense.

"Natural" is less attractive to us than it would be had Agassiz first
interpreted it for us rather than Rousseau or present-day exponents of
"the simple life," "back to nature," and "back to the land." It is too
often forgotten that no one sins against natural law more grievously
t