True culture consists not in the cultivation of outward accomplishments. It consists not in intellectual acquirements. It consists in the development of the triune man--body, soul and spirit--in their divine harmony. Without a cultivation of the spirit in harmony with its immortal destiny, all that this world calls culture is but the gilded tinsel that bedecks the putrefaction of death. The truly cultured man is developed in harmony with the laws of his being. This being is compound, having a fleshly and a spiritual side. Hence, to cultivate one to the neglect of the other is to disproportion him whom God created in His own image. As we exist first in time and next in eternity, that culture which loses sight of either state misconceives the full mission of man. Man's conception of his present mission and ultimate destiny determines his standard of culture. He must have an ideal, and if that ideal be low, his life will be correspondingly low. Nothing but Christianity can furnish man an ideal worthy of himself; and nothing but Christian culture can develop him in the direction of that ideal. Classical antiquity never conceived a destiny worthy of man. It never contemplated him in that relation of Christ-likeness to his God, which the Bible reveals. Even Aristotle, the most cultivated of all heathen philosophers, thought that only a part of mankind possessed a rational soul. With such a conception man is incapable of the highest culture. It is degrading to his dignity. All culture based on such a hypothesis must be a culture of the flesh, and not of the spirit. It is the culture of materialism, not of Christianity. Between modern materialism and the cultivated heathenism of the ancient Greeks the difference is not worth the naming. "To assume the existence of a soul," says Vogt, "which uses the brain as an instrument with which to work as it pleases, is utter nonsense. Physiology distinctly and categorically pronounces against any individual immortality, and against all ideas which are connected with a figment of a separate existence of the soul." "Man," says Moleschott, "is produced from wind and ashes. The action of vegetable life called him into existence.... Thought consists in the motion of matter, it is a translocation of the cerebral substance; without phosphorus there can be no thought; and consciousness itself is nothing but an attribute of matter." This deification of the flesh, this "gospel of dirt," makes man consist simply of what he eats. The missionaries of this heathen gospel have no need to address the reason of men; only feed them on the right kind of food and their regeneration is accomplished! Materialism is a religion of the flesh, a deification of matter; its laver of regeneration is the chemist's retort; its new birth, phosphorus! Give the brain plenty of phosphorus by high living, and you develop the _soul_ of materialism! Yet the heralds of this soulless gospel talk flippantly about culture!