The Bible of nature : $b or, The principles of secularism. A contribution to the religion of the futureOswald, Felix L. (Felix Leopold)
Religion
The Bible of nature : $b or, The principles of secularism. A contribution to the religion of the future
Oswald, Felix L. (Felix Leopold)
Secularism
Mankind has never wholly recovered from that reign of insanity.
Indifference to many of the plainest health-laws of nature is still the
reproach of our so-called civilization. Our moralists rant about the
golden streets of the New Jerusalem, but find no time to expurgate the
slums of their own cities; our missionary societies spend millions to
acquaint the natives of distant islands with the ceremony of baptism,
but refuse to contribute a penny to the establishment of free public
baths for the benefit of their poor neighbors, whose children are
scourged or caged like wild beasts for trying to mitigate the martyrdom
of the midsummer season by a bath in the waters of the next river.
Temperance, indeed, is preached in the name of the miracle-monger who
turned water into alcohol; but millions of toilers who seek to drown
their misery in the Lethe of intoxication are deprived of every
healthier pastime; the magistrates of our wealthy cities rage with
penal ordinances against the abettors of public amusements on the day
when nine-tenths of our laborers find their only leisure for
recreation. Poor factory children who would spend the holidays in the
paradise of the green hills are lured into the baited trap of a
Sabbath-school and bribed to memorize the stale twaddle of Hebrew
ghost-stories or the records of fictitious genealogies; but the offer
to enlarge the educational sphere of our public schools by the
introduction of a health primer would be scornfully rejected as an
attempt to divert the attention of the pupils from more important
topics.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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