Wholeness, holiness ... "if thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light." ... "thy faith hath made thee _whole_." The idea seems to be a positive one--a condition of the body in which it is an entirety, a unity--a central force maintaining that condition; and disease being the break-up--or break-down--of that entirety into multiplicity. The peculiarity about our modern conception of Health is that it seems to be a purely negative one. So impressed are we by the myriad presence of Disease--so numerous its dangers, so sudden and unforetellable its attacks--that we have come to look upon health as the mere absence of the same. As a solitary spy picks his way through a hostile camp at night, sees the enemy sitting round his fires, and trembles at the crackling of a twig beneath his feet--so the traveller through this world, comforter in one hand and physic-bottle in the other, must pick his way, fearful lest at any time he disturb the sleeping legions of death--thrice blessed if by any means, steering now to the right and now to the left, and thinking only of his personal safety, he pass by without discovery to the other side. Health with us is a negative thing. It is a neutralisation of opposing dangers. It is to be neither rheumatic nor gouty, consumptive nor bilious, to be untroubled by head-ache, back-ache, heart-ache, or any of the "thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to." These are the realities. Health is the mere negation of them. The modern notion, and which has evidently in a very subtle way penetrated the whole thought of to-day, is that the essential fact of life is the existence of innumerable external forces, which, by a very delicate balance and difficult to maintain, concur to produce Man--who in consequence may at any moment be destroyed again by the non-concurrence of those forces. The older notion apparently is that the essential fact of life _is_ Man himself; and that the external forces, so-called, are in some way subsidiary to this fact--that they may aid his expression or manifestation, or that they may hinder it, but that they can neither create nor annihilate the Man. Probably both ways of looking at the subject are important; there is a man that can be destroyed, and there is a man that cannot be destroyed. The old words, soul and body, indicate this contrast; but like all words they are subject to the defect that they are an attempt to draw a line where no line can ultimately be drawn; they mark a contrast where, in fact, there is only continuity--for between the little mortal man who dwells here and now, and the divine and universal Man who also forms a part of our consciousness, is there not a perfect gradation of being, and where (if anywhere) is there a gulf fixed? Together they form a unit, and each is necessary to the other: the first cannot do without the second, and the second cannot get along at all without the first. To use the words of