D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
But Nature had her revenge, and the despisers of their own bodies became so truly contemptible that in comparison the rudest barbarians of antiquity seemed respectable men. The neglect of physical exercise avenged itself in loathsome diseases, the perverted instincts exploded in vices; the monkish self-abasers became caricatures of manhood: bloated, whining, mean, and viciously sensual wretches, the laughing-stock of foreign nations and the curse and disgrace of their own. Physically, mentally, and morally, the earth-despising convent drone represented the vilest type of degeneration to which the manhood of our race has ever been degraded, and the [[43]]enforced veneration of such monsters, as exemplars of perfection, has perverted the ethical standards of mankind to a degree for which our present generation is as yet far from having wholly recovered. The love of athletic recreations is still smirched with the stigma of the Middle Ages; “respectability” is too often mistaken for a synonym of pedantry and conventional effeminacy; parents still frown upon the health-giving sports of their children; vice still sneaks in the disguise of saintliness and world-renouncing aversion to physical recreations.
The degeneration of many once manful races has reached an incurable phase: the listless resignation to physical abasement and decrepitude. Earth has spurned her despisers; millions of priest-slaves in southern Europe have lost the inheritance of their fathers, and have to till the soil for aliens and despots. The arbitrament of war has made them taste the lowest dregs of national humiliation; the life-long worshipers of whining saints appealed in vain to the God of Battles, and were forced to eat dust at the feet of the despised Infidel and heretic. The ships of the Spanish Armada were consecrated by a chorus of ranting priests commending them to the miraculous protection of heaven; and heaven’s answer came in the blast of the hurricane that buried their fleet in the depths of the sea. The same nation once more invoked the aid of the saints for the protection of an armament against the great naval powers of the nineteenth century. The ships were ceremoniously baptized with the most fulsomely pious names: “The Holy Savior of the World,” “Saint Maria,” “Saint [[44]]Joseph,” “The Most Holy Trinity,” and sent forth in full reliance on the protection of supernatural agencies. But in the encounter with Nelson’s self-relying veterans the sacred bubble at once collapsed. St. Joseph’s impotence howled in vain for the assistance of the Holy Ghost. The Savior of the World could save himself only by a shameful flight, and the Most Holy Trinity succumbed to a decided surplus of holes.