he brute. And now
that man is becoming partly civilized he is in danger of losing them.
Faculties not used are taken away. Dame Nature seems to consider that
anything you do not utilize is not needed; and as she is averse to
carrying dead freight she drops it out.

But man can think, and the more he thinks and the further he projects his
thought, the less need he has for his physical senses. Homer's matchless
vision was the rich possession of a blind man; Milton never saw Paradise
until he was sightless, and Helen Keller knows a world of things that were
neither told to her in lectures nor read from books. The far-reaching
intellect often goes with a singularly imperfect body, and these things
seem to point to the truth that the body is one thing and the soul
another.

I make no argument for impoverished vitality, nor do I plead the cause of
those who enjoy poor health. Yet how often do we find that the
confessional of a family or a neighborhood is the bedside of one who sees
the green fields only as did the Lady of Shalott, by holding a
looking-glass so that it reflects the out-of-doors. Let me carry that
simile one step further, and say that the mirror of the soul when kept
free from fleck and stain, reveals the beauties of the universe. And I am
not sure but that the soul, freed from the distractions of sense and the
trammels of flesh, glides away to a height where things are observed for
the first time in their true proportions.

"The soul knows all things," says Emerson, "and knowledge is only a
remembering."

* * * * *

The Martineaus were Huguenots, a stern, sturdy stock that suffered exile
rather than forego the right of free-thought and free speech. These are
the people who are the salt of the earth. And yet as I read history I see
that they are the people who have been hunted by dogs, and followed by
armed men carrying fagots. The driving of the Huguenots from France came
near bankrupting the land, and the flight of Jews and Huguenots into
England helped largely to make that country the counting-house of the
world. Take the Quakers, Puritans, Huguenots and other refugees from
America and it is no longer the land of the free or the home of the brave.

Of the seven Presidents who presided over the deliberations of that first
Continental Congress in Philadelphia, three were Huguenots: Henry Laurens,
John Jay and Elias Boudinot, and in the seats there were Puritans not a
few.