CHAPTER XXII.

A LONG LIFE, AND HOW TO REACH IT.

Not in the world of light alone,

Where God has built His blazing throne,

Nor yet alone on earth below,

With belted seas that come and go,

And endless isles of sunlit green,

Is all the Maker's glory seen

Look in upon thy wondrous frame,

Eternal wisdom still the same. -HOLMES

Pile luxury as high as you will, health is better. - JULIA WARD HOWL

‘O blessed health! thou art above all gold and treasure; 't is thou who enlargest the soul, and openest all its powers to receive instruction and to relish virtue. He that has thee has little more to wish for ; and he that is so wretched as to want thee, wants everything without thee. -STERNE.

No chronic tortures racked his aged limb,

For luxury and sloth had nourished none for him.

BRYANT,

The Old Man's Funerair "Health and cheerfulness make beauty."

The nearer men live to each other, the shorter their lives are. - DR. PARR

Some men dig their graves with their teeth. -SYDNEY SMITH.

" Nor love, nor honor, wealth, nor power, Can give the heart a cheerful hour When health is lost."

The stomach begs and clamors, and listens to no precepts. And yet it is not an obdurate creditor ; for it is dismissed with small payment if you only give it what you owe, and not as much as you can. -SENECA. Shut the door to the sun and you will open it to the doctor. - ITALIAN PROVERB.

Joy, temperance, and repose, Slam the door on the Doctor's nose.

LONGFELLOW. 'T is the sublime of man, Our noontide majesty, - to know ourselves, Part and proportion of a wondrous whole.

COLERIDGE.

THE greatest artist the world has known painted a picture, the most beautiful ever seen. Day by day, for

WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE " Don't let your heart grow cold, and you shall carry Youth with you into the teens of your second century."
years, he wrought upon this masterpiece, developing it from a mere sketch until it became a picture which all who saw delighted to look upon. But notwithstanding his wonderful power, the artist could never attain in this work the perfection sought. His colors seemed to change in the night. The rosy flush imparted to cheek and lip were lost as often as they were renewed. The flashing eyes grew dull and leaden, and seemed to sink into the canvas. The beautiful flesh lost its rose-leaf tint, and became sallow and unnatural. The painter's art was baffled, and he knew not why.

Yet his hand had not lost its cunning, his colors were not impure, his conception was not at fault. His work was well done, but it was spoiled in the night by an enemy, a rival painter whom none praised and whose work no one admired. Jealous of the fame his rival had won by joyous, glorious pictures, while his own sombre works were shunned, he crept by night to the studio of the other, and with palette spread with shadow tints, wrought ruin with the work he could not imitate. Thus the painting which should have excelled all others never attained perfection, and was ruined at last beyond all hope of restoration.

Again and again the two painters have repeated their efforts upon other canvas, with similar results, as a rule. Their names are Health and Disease, and they paint upon human canvas. The first rises and retires early, and works as much as possible in the open air, in the blessed sunlight, where keen winds blow in winter and zephyrs in spring and summer, where golden harvests wave and fruit-laden trees sway in the autumn breezes, where fountains murmur and rivulets sing, where men work and romping children play, where cattle are afield, and birds and bees on the wing.

The other sleeps through the early hours, but comes forth when Nature is asleep;. and under the flickering streetlights or the light of the silent stars, or in dark nooks and corners sometimes by day, his withering touch falls upon the fairest work of his rival, injuring it all and utterly ruining much of it. Only a very few paintings are kept almost wholly out of the reach of Disease, yet how wonderful are they in their comparative perfection!

A vase of exquisite beauty, found in a marble sarcophagus near Rome during the sixteenth century, was bought by the Duchess of Portland for ten thousand dollars and loaned to the British Museum. The visitor is powerfully impressed with its matchless symmetry; but, on examining it closely, he sees that the surface is seamed with cracks, and that in some places holes have been closed by a kind of cement. He is told that a madman once struck this beautiful vase with his cane, and broke it into a hundred pieces. The fragments were put together again at great cost and trouble; yet the vase is practically a wreck.

The world is full of men and women like this vase - marred, scarred, broken, patched, mere shadows of their former selves. They look fairly well, but their constitutions have been broken by dissipation, by exposure, by overwork, by ignorance, by violation in some way of the laws of nature. Many of them have patched the pieces together by drugs, physicians, climate, or travel; but, like the vase, they can withstand no strain. Mocked by an ambition for success, but with no strength to attain it, they drag out a miserable existence.

"I am certain," says Horace Mann, "I could have performed twice the labor, both better and with greater ease to myself, had I known as much of the laws of health and life at twenty-one as I do now. In college I was taught all about the motions of the planets, as carefully as though they would have been in danger of getting off the track if I had not known how to trace their orbits; but about my own organization, and the conditions indispensable to the healthful functions of my own body, I was left in profound ignorance. No-
thing could be more preposterous. I ought to have begun at home, and taken the stars when it should have become their turn. The consequence was, I broke down at the beginning of my second college year, and have never had a well day since. Whatever labor I have since been able to do, I have done it all on credit instead of capital -a most ruinous way, either in regard to health or money. For the last twenty-five years, so far as it regards health, I have been put, from day to day, upon my good behavior; and during the whole of this period, as an Hibernian would say, if I had lived as other folks do for a month, I should have died in a fortnight."

The age of sawdust puddings and plank beds is past. Pascal's doctrine that disease is the natural condition of Christians, and that the body is the natural enemy of the soul, is exploded. Muscular Christianity is the demand of the hour. The body is no longer looked upon as the devil chained to the soul, to be mortified and starved to keep the passions down. Pale, emaciated, spiritual shadows are no longer in demand in the pulpit. A diet of bread and water is no longer regarded as conducive to real piety.

Tallness is no longer the only sign of virtue, nor do width and weight any longer indicate a tendency to crime; - nor is muscle associated with rowdyism. The hero of the ancients had the strength of ten men, and his servant could eat granite rock. The Cid had such power of resistance that he could sleep with a leper and not contract the disease. The Romans despised physical weakness and deformity. The great and wise Cato conceived the plan of banishing all the decrepit, deaf, and helpless to the island of Esculapius in the Tiber, where they perished of hunger and exposure. This was the reward of a slave for a life of menial servitude. The Greeks also banished their weak and deformed when they could no longer serve the state. A magnificent physique was the great object of their games, contests, and festivities. They deified health in the young and beautiful goddess Hygeia. Compare the pale, chestless, calfless, attenuated young men of today with the stalwart youths of Greece and Rome. What a magnificent physical perfection distinguishes the North American Indians. When the painter West was taken by prominent Italians to see the treasures of the Vatican, he was first shown the celebrated statue of Apollo. “ Oh! " he exclaimed, " a Mohawk Indian ! " They are born with good physiques, and their training all tends in the same direction; and the average Indian boy of fifteen can withstand, more fatigue than athletes among the white men. Smallpox and bullets are about the only things that can kill them. Compare these with the thousands of haggard students in our American colleges, muscle-starved, book-crammed, and "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."

What a sad commentary it is upon the institutions whose avowed object is to help young men in making their way in a hard, practical world, that so many break down utterly and are compelled to spend the rest of their lives hunting for health. The first requisite to success is to be a first class animal. The brain gets a great, deal of credit that belongs to the stomach.

With rare exceptions, the great prizes of life fall to those of stalwart, robust physique. If you have a bodily weakness, such as lack of vigor or physical stamina, the effect will show itself in everything you do, and cripple your whole lifework. Every one who knows you reads your weakness and lack of tone in your unsteady eye and hesitating step. It appears in every letter you write, in every speech you make, in everything you do; you cannot disguise it, and you will fall as far below success as you fall below the health. line. Every faculty of the mind sympathizes with every defect and weakness of the body.

The world is full of half-done, botched work, the result of weak and sickly lives. The tendency of civilization has been to deteriorate bodily stamina.

Cities are the graves of the physiques of our race. Long residence in cities lowers the type of physical manhood. If towns were not constantly recruited from the country, the constitutions and intellects of their inhabitants would rapidly decline in vigor. Most of the stalwart men of our large centres were born in the country, but each succeeding generation of their descendants becomes weaker.

How quickly we Americans exhaust life. With what panting haste we pursue everything. Every American you meet seems to be late for a train. Hurry is stamped in the wrinkles of the American face. We pride ourselves upon being practical men, men who strike sledge-hammer blows in our business, men who make business of recreation, even. We are men of action, we die without it; nay, we go faster and faster as the years go by, speed our machinery to the utmost, stretch the silver cord of life until it snaps. We have not even leisure to die a natural death, we go at high pressure until the boiler bursts. We have actually changed the type of our diseases, to suit our changed constitution. Instead of the lingering maladies of our fathers, we drop down and die of heart disease or apoplexy, now so common, formerly so rare. Even death has adopted our terrible gait.

Nature is a great economist. She makes the most of every opportunity, she works up all odds and ends. After you are wrecked and useless she leaves the wreck upon the rocks or reef on which you were stranded, and hoists her signal of danger, as a warning to others. You lose your life, but nature wants to use you for a warning. You lose your health, but the tell-tales are left in your face to show the world how it went. If by drink, nature hangs out as her sign a red flag of dis-
tress, it may be, on your nose, in front of your eyes, where you can't escape it, and where everybody you meet reads the terrible warning. Though your life is a failure, and you have become useless, nature can still afford to keep you as an object-lesson to warn your fellows.

Nature is no sentimentalist. A bullet will not swerve a hair's breadth from its course, though a Lincoln or a Garfield stand in its way. A drop of prussic acid will kill a king as quickly as his meanest vassal. Water will drown you, even though you are saving your own child from death. Fire will burn you to a cinder, even while you are trying to snatch your

dear ones from the flames. Every atom in the universe has immutable law stamped upon it. The rose blooms in your garden today under the same laws that unfolded the petals of the first flower in Eden. In all the sidereal ages the stars have returned from their vast journeys through trackless space, with the same unvarying accuracy as when they began to roll on the morning of creation. They have never once lost their way in their wild path through space, nor varied a second in a century. Not one whit less are we subject to the immutable laws of God.

We sometimes hear a clergyman consoling a mother, distracted over the death of her darling child, by telling her that a mysterious Providence has taken it from her for wise reasons, and that she must find comfort in her bereavement. What! has God snatched from loving parents a beautiful child just blooming into youth ? Does the Creator of harmony produce discord ? Does the Author of health and beauty smite his noblest work ere it is finished -a work into which He has breathed his own image, and which He has endowed with aspirations and possibilities as high as heaven itself ? It is a libel upon Him who fashioned the human body, so wonderfully and fearfully wrought,
that it may withstand the ravages of time for a century. Away with such sickly sentimentalism and blasphemy!

God does not murder nor torture his children. He rather tries in a thousand ways to induce them to keep the laws of health, which, if obeyed, would carry them into the teens of their second century. He has shielded us on every hand by kindly hints. He coaxes us by pleasure, and drives us by pain. He tries in every way to prolong life after we have forfeited every right to it, and have become useless drones. The faithful heart often beats the funeral march some time after death, and is the last servant to leave the body, lest some spark of life yet remain, which it might fan into a living flame.

When alcohol goads on the drunkard's heart faster and faster, and robs it of a part of its nine hours of rest, which it should have every day, and which it must snatch between the beats, Nature even thickens its walls, in order to enable it to do the additional work imposed upon it, which is equivalent to raising fifteen tons one foot each day. It matters not that the poor wretch has forfeited every right to live, by violating every law of health; Nature helps him just the same.

Our nerves are sentinels placed thickest where there is the most danger. Pain has a use and purpose beyond those of happiness or pleasure. It tends to restrict the hurtful practices of life. Nature thus compels us to recognize her established order, or laws. The very sensitiveness and delicacy of our nerves, which give exquisite pleasure when used aright, give intense suffering when they are abused. A cinder might ruin the eye if the pain did not compel its prompt removal. Gazing at the sun would destroy the child's sight, were it not for the sensitiveness of the nerves, which compels the closing of the lids. Pain is the great monitor of our lives, ever reminding us of approaching danger. Few children would grow up without being disfigured and mutilated, were they not constantly warned by sensitive nerves. A paralytic was once advised by his physician to take a warm foot-bath; and, because of the loss of the sensitiveness of the nerves in that foot, he actually scalded his skin without knowing that the water was hot.

In the alleys and by-ways of our cities we often see the sign, "Dangerous Passing." The Creator has put up such signs all along the pathway of life. We read them over every street and alley that leads to vice and degradation. We read over the doors that lead to the gambling dens, the saloon, the dens of infamy, "All hope abandon, ye who enter here." Dangerous Passing! We read it in the deformed and crippled lives of those who have disregarded its warning, in the botched, half -finished work of the weak and inefficient. We read it in the ruined lives, the lost opportunities, the blighted hopes of those who heed it not; we read it in the prematurely old. All who have violated Nature's laws carry about in their bodies the unmistakable signs which the world may read as a terrible warning.

"It is continued temperance which sustains the body for the longest period of time, and which most surely preserves it free from sickness," writes Humboldt, when asked the secret of his success. No employer will keep in his office a drunkard, a gambler, or a profligate, for the very good reason that these vices not only debase the body, but also glut the mind with thoughts of which business has no part. Drink has become the curse of the world. Whole battalions of splendid young men who started in life with glowing hopes have been swept away by whiskey and rum.

The pen is not made nor the hand formed that has the power to adequately describe the horror and the power of this curse. The very instinct of self-preservation should keep a man from a saloon, as it does from a pest house. Dr. Richardson, a high authority, says that alcohol is the most insidious destroyer of health, happiness, and life.

" My recipe for self-preservation is exercise," said David Dudley Field. "I am a very temperate man, and have always been so. I have taken care of myself, and as I have a good constitution I suppose that is the reason I am so well." Exercise is indeed a great life. Preserver.

When the pores of the body are kept open by regular exercise, the pores of the imagination are apt to be closed against tainted subjects. Sana mens in sano corpore, is a well-understood maxim. Says Frederick W. Robertson, England's most spiritual preacher: "It is wonderful how views of life depend upon exercise and right management of the physical constitution."

Healthy thoughts and healthy doctrines must come from healthy minds, and healthy minds cannot exist apart from healthy bodies.

The Sultan once consulted his physician in regard to a troublesome malady. Believing that only fresh air and exercise were needed, and knowing how little the world values plain, simple things, the doctor said: “ Here is a ball which I have stuffed with race and precious herbs. Your Highness must take this bat and beat this ball until you perspire freely; you must do this every day." The Sultan followed these directions, and was cured of his disease without realizing that he was only taking exercise.

When asked if he got any exercise, the great Frenchman La Harpe replied : "When my head gets fatigued I put it out of the window for a while." The Arabs say that Allah does not count from the allotted years of our lives the days spent in the chase. An English manufacturer stated before a committee of the House of Commons that he had removed the means of ventilation from his factory, as he noticed that the men ate a great deal more when they breathed pure air, and he could not afford it.

“Youth will never live to age," says Sidney, "unless they keep themselves in health with exercise, and in heart with joyfulness." But work conduces to longevity in a greater degree than even cheerfulness or mere exercise.

Dr. Abernethy's advice to a lazy rich man, full of gout and idle humors, unhappy and without appetite, troubled with over-indulgence, and pampered with soft beds and rich food, was to "live upon sixpence a day, and earn it: " a golden sentence, a Spartan maxim which would save half the ill temper, the quarrels, the bickerings, and wranglings of the poor rich people, and would rub the rust off many a fine mind, which is now ugly and disfigured from want of use.

"I always find something to keep me busy," said Peter Cooper, when asked how he had preserved so well his strength of body and mind; "and to be doing something is the best medicine one can take. I run up and down stairs here almost as easily as I did years ago, when I never expected that my term would run into the nineties."

Life is a struggle at best. We scarcely begin to live ere we commence to die. Life and death strive in us for mastery, and we are but too confident of how the struggle will end. The enemies of human life are thick on every side. A thousand diseases dog our footsteps from the cradle to the grave. They lurk in the food we eat, in the water we drink, in the air we breathe. They watch at the door of every cold, exposure, neglect, or imprudence, seeking entrance to the citadel of life.

The plague has ever followed hard on the heels of famine and of financial depression. The germs of disease which have lurked in the system for years, perhaps, while the body was vigorous and strong, suddenly spring into activity the moment the system is depressed below the health line, and its wonted power of resistance gone.

There is then no overplus of vitality to resist their development. Kernels of wheat which had been in a mummy's hand four thousand years sprang into life when planted. They only awaited moisture, heat, sun light, and air to develop them. The cholera once spread all over Europe from the germs in a sailor's clothes, found in an old chest on shipboard, after lying there fifty years. They waited half a century for the proper conditions for development. We should take care never to let our systems run down below the health-line. Germs of a hundred diseases lurk just below this line, waiting for some indiscretion, some weakness, some opportunity to gain a foothold. So in the field of human society, corruption first attacks those who are physically feeble. How many are wicked only because they are physically weak! Many a youth becomes morally depraved simply because he has been a stranger to fresh air, cold water, and exercise.

Nature is ever merciful, and tries to bring compensation for the loss of any function. If you become deaf and dumb and blind, Nature develops an exquisite sense of touch. Laura Bridgman could even detect the presence of a good, or of a bad person in a room, by an agreeable or disagreeable sensation.

An electric eel cannot give shocks all the time. An overstrained bow will soon lose its tension. But who shall dare to enter God's temple to repair any mischief ? The wisdom of the wisest is of no avail to rebreathe the departed breath into the lifeless clay. All the chemists in the universe cannot manufacture one drop of blood, nor can physician's skill rouse the tired heart which has once stood still. No doctor can lay his clumsy hand on, the delicate brain and bid it think again. But the necessary ounce of prevention is at one's command. He must not live too intensely, if he would live long in years.

"No thinking person hearing Malibran sing," said Poe, "could have doubted that she would die in the spring of her days. She crowded ages into hours. She left the world at twenty-five, having existed her thousands of years."

Raphael, according to E. P. Whipple the greatest painter of moral beauty, and Titian, the greatest painter of sensuous beauty, were both almost equally young, though Raphael died at thirty-seven, while Titian was prematurely cut off by the plague when he was only a hundred.

Byron died, worn-out and old, at thirty-six; Burke was young at sixty-six.

Dr. Richardson says that the natural life of animals is six times the period required to become fully grown. According to this, man should live about one hundred and fifty years. That such longevity is attainable is shown by Russian statistics. In 1891 there were reported in that country eight hundred fifty-eight deaths of people between the ages of one hundred and one hundred and five years, one hundred thirty between one hundred fifteen and one hundred twenty, while three were reported to be one hundred fifty years of age, or more. But in Russia, as indeed in all European countries, the thing which surprises an American is the deliberateness with which everything is done. Everybody seems to have time enough.

In Austria the wholesale stores and the banks close between noon and two o'clock. Europeans realize that rest should follow intense application, and that long-continued labor should be performed with deliberation.

"I would keep better hours if I were a boy again," said James T. Fields; "that is, I would go to bed earlier than most boys do." Nothing gives more mental and bodily vigor than sound rest when properly applied. Sleep is our replenisher.

In all my political life," said Gladstone, "I have never been kept awake five minutes by any debate in Parliament." Horace Greeley refused to sit up at night sessions of Congress, abruptly leaving when his hour for retiring arrived.

“ I can do nothing," said Grant, "without nine hours' sleep."

Late hours are shadows from the grave. For the evils resulting from late hours, improper diet, lack of exercise, and other forms of intemperance, men have been accustomed to seek relief in, drugs, but they are beginning to realize that the aid a physician can render is almost wholly limited to cheering and encouraging his patients, and helping them to follow ordinary hygienic laws. Very many of our diseases exist only in the imagination and consciousness of the patient. Moliere said that physicians pour medicine about which they know little into bodies of which they know less, in order to cure disease about which they know nothing at all.

“We talk together," said Moliere of his doctor; " he prescribes, I never take his physic, and consequently I get well" At another time he said that a doctor is a man whom people pay to relate trifles in the sick-room, until either nature has cured the patient, or physic has killed him.

Employ three physicians: First, Doctor Quiet; then, Doctor Merryman ; and then, Doctor Diet.

Our beliefs are built upon models, and an ideal body can never be built upon a deformed and sick model. The model in the mind must be perfect, if we would obtain perfection of the body.

The very fact that we are conscious that the physical manhood of our race should be lifted out of its bondage to a higher level, and that the Great Teacher commanded us not only to be perfect, but "perfect even as our Father in Heaven is perfect," is proof that such perfection is possible. God has not given the bird an instinct for the South in winter, without a South to match it; nor has he mocked us with ideals, longings, and aspirations which we have no power to attain. The very consciousness that we are capable of performing infinitely more than we ever do accomplish, is an indication that such perfection is possible, and that we shall have time and opportunity somewhere to develop into that perfect model. Man has an ideal in his soul, of the physical man, as well as of the moral man, and He who gave this ideal will give the opportunity for its realization.

Although we cannot defy death, it is now well known that we can greatly delay it by carefully observing the laws of health, especially in regard to diet. "The chief characteristics of old age are found to be deposits of a gelatinous and fibrinous character in the human system, producing gradual ossification. Man begins life in a gelatinous condition, and ends it in an osseous or bony one-soft in infancy, hard in old age. This process is desirable in childhood; but, as we grow older, it is thought we may retard it more and more by swallowing less and less of the carbonates and phosphates of lime, the principal agents by which the transformation is effected. For this purpose the best drink is distilled water, while fruits, fish, poultry, veal, and lamb are much better than beef, bread, or salt meat of any kind. In this, as in other things, the best way to conquer Nature is to learn and obey her laws.

The body has its claims, - it is a good servant; treat it well, and it will do your work; attend to its wants and requirements, listen kindly and patiently to its hints, occasionally forestall its necessities by a little indulgence, and your consideration will be repaid with interest. But task it, and pine it, and suffocate it, make it a slave instead of a servant., it may not

complain much, but, like the weary camel in the desert, it will lie down and die. - CHARLES ELAM.

O Father, grant Thy love divine, To make these mystic temples Thine. When wasting age and wearying strife Have sapped the leaning walls of life ; When darkness gathers over all, And the last tottering pillars fall, Take the poor dust Thy mercy warms, And mould it into heavenly forms.

HOLMES