ends, by producing the sterility which results from vicious indulgence.
It was not till I met with two wonderful sermons on "The Kingdom of
God," by that great master of "divine philosophy," Dr. James Martineau,
that I first got a clue to the moral difficulty and to that fuller
understanding of our human nature which is so essential to all who have
the training and moulding of the young. And, therefore, I ask you to let
me enter at some length into this teaching, which will not only give us
light for our own guidance, but enable us to grasp the right principles
on which we have to act in the moral training of the coming
generation.[6]

Now, in trying to think out the laws of our own being, we are met at
the very outset by the great crux in the moral world: What is the true
relation of the material to the spiritual,--of the body, with its
instincts and appetites, to the moral personality, with its conscience
and will? On the one hand, seeing the fatal proneness of man to obey his
appetites and run into terrible excesses, ascetics in all ages and of
all creeds have taught that the body itself is evil and the seat of sin;
that its instincts must be crushed and its appetites repressed and
eradicated; and that it is only so far as you trample your animal nature
under foot that you can rise to be a saint. "Brute," "blind," "dead,"
have been the epithets bestowed on matter, which is a ceaseless play of
living forces that rest not day nor night. To look down on the material
pleasures with suspicion, to fly contact with the rude world and lose
one's self in the unembodied splendors of the spiritual, to save souls
rather than men and women, to preach abstract doctrines rather than
grapple with hideous concrete problems--this has been the tendency of
the religious spirit in all ages, a tendency of which positive
asceticism, with its mortification of the body, and its ideal of
virginity, and marriage regarded as more or less a concession to the