FLESH AND SPIRIT

use of the body, not to cnishing it and keeping it under. The body is not meant to be a constant menace ; but to become a dear companion. " Nor soûl helps flesh," said Browning, "more than flesh helps soûl." " The body is a root of the soûl." * It is as if the plane of mortality were an underground world ; what we see hère of each other are such portions of ourselves as are buried in the soil of finitude; the soûl is blossoming on another plane, but draws part of its subsistence from mortal expérience, which is mediated through the body as through a root. There is no more sensé in asceticism, as ordinarily conceived and usually practised by religions devotees, than there is in starving and bleeding the roots of a plant, though there is such a thing as root-pnming against rank fruitless growth.

Regarded in another way — as we hâve already seen — the body is the race-mind made visible, it is our race-inheritance made available. It is stupid to squander that inheritance, but no less stupid to put it under lock and key. The great ideals of the race, which Carpenter calls the gods, focûs for the individual in the physiological centres of the body.

The body is not vile. It is not only a Temple of God, but it is a collection of temples ; and just as the images of the gods dwèll in the temples of a land, and are the objects of service and the centres of conmiand there, so, we may say, the gods themselves dwell in the centres