All sensuality is one,though it takes many forms;all purity is one.It is the same whether a man eat,or drink,or cohabit,or sleep sensually.They are but one appetite,and we only need to see a person do any one of these things to know how great a sensualist he is.The impure can neither stand nor sit with purity.When the reptile is attacked at one mouth of his burrow,he shows himself at another.If you would be chaste,you must be temperate.What is chastity?How shall a man know if he is chaste?He shall not know it.We have heard of this virtue,but we know not what it is.We speak conformably to the rumor which we have heard.From exertion come wisdom and purity;from sloth ignorance and sensuality.In the student sensuality is a sluggish habit of mind.An unclean person is universally a slothful one,one who sits by a stove,whom the sun shines on prostrate,who reposes without being fatigued.If you would avoid uncleanness,and all the sins,work earnestly,though it be at cleaning a stable.Nature is hard to be overcome,but she must be overcome.What avails it that you are Christian,if you are not purer than the heathen,if you deny yourself no more,if you are not more religious?I know of many systems of religion esteemed heathenish whose precepts fill the reader with shame,and provoke him to new endeavors,though it be to the performance of rites merely.
I hesitate to say these things,but it is not because of the subject,-I care not how obscene my words are,-but because I cannot speak of them without betraying my impurity.We discourse freely without shame of one form of sensuality,and are silent about another.We are so degraded that we cannot speak simply of the necessary functions of human nature.In earlier ages,in some countries,every function was reverently spoken of and regulated by law.Nothing was too trivial for the Hindoo lawgiver,however offensive it may be to modern taste.He teaches how to eat,drink,cohabit,void excrement and urine and the like,elevating what is mean,and does not falsely excuse himself by calling these things trifles.
Every man is the builder of a temple,called his body,to the god he worships,after a style purely his own,nor can he get off by hammering marble instead.We are all sculptors and painters,and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones.Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features,any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.
John Farmer sat at his door one September evening,after a hard day's work,his mind still running on his labor more or less.Having bathed,he sat down to re-create his intellectual man.It was a rather cool evening,and some of his neighbors were apprehending a frost.He had not attended to the train of his thoughts long when he heard some one playing on a flute,and that sound harmonized with his mood.Still he thought of his work;but the burden of his thought was,that though this kept running in his head,and he found himself planning and contriving it against his will,yet it concerned him very little.It was no more than the scurf of his skin,which was constantly shuffled off.But the notes of the flute came home to his ears out of a different sphere from that he worked in,and suggested work for certain faculties which slumbered in him.They gently did away with the street,and the village,and the state in which he lived.A voice said to him,-Why do you stay here and live this mean moiling life,when a glorious existence is possible for you?Those same stars twinkle over other fields than these.-But how to come out of this condition and actually migrate thither?All that he could think of was to practise some new austerity,to let his mind descend into his body and redeem it,and treat himself with ever increasing respect.
