much of moral improvement from their
better preservation. But to the Tub School,
good digestive powers, and their consequence,
good temper, were evidences of lax principles,
and cleanliness was ungodliness or effeminacy;
as the unpurified denouncer prayed to St.
Giles, or sacrificed to Venus Cloacina. Take
the old monks as an example. Not that we
are about to condemn the whole Catholic
Church under a cowled mask. She has
valuable men among her sons; but, in such a
large body, there must of necessity be some
members weaker than the rest; and the
mendicant friars, and do-nothing monks, were
about the weakest and the worst that ever
appeared by the Catholic altar. They were
essentially of the Tub School, as false to
the best purposes of mankind as the famous
old savage of Alexander's time. Dirt and
vanity, bile and condemnation, were the
paternosters of their litany; and what else
lay in the tub which the king over-shadowed
from the sun? All the accounts, of
which we read, of pious horror of baths and
washhouses—all the frantic renunciation of
laundresses, and the belief in hair-shirts, to
the prejudice of honest linen—all the religious
zeal against small-tooth combs, and the sin
which lay in razors and nail-brushes—all the
holy preference given to coarse cobbling of
skins of beasts, over civilised tailoring of
seemly garments— all the superiority of bare
feet, which never knew the meaning of a
pediluvium, over those which shoes and
hose kept warm, and foot-baths rendered
clean—all the hatred of madness against the
refinements of life, and the cultivation of the
beautiful:—these were the evidences of the
Diogenic philosophy; and of Monachism too;
and of other forms of faith, which we could
name in the same breath. And how much
good was in them ? What natural divinity
lies in fur, which the cotton plant does not
possess? Wherein consists the holiness of
mud, and the ungodliness of alkali? wherein
the purity of a matted beard, and the
impiety of Metcalfe's brushes, and Mechi's
magic strop? It may be so; and we all the
while may be mentally blind; and yet, if we
lived in a charnel-house, whose horrors the
stony core of a cataract concealed, we could
not wish to be couched, that seeing, we might
understand the frightful conditions, of which
blindness kept us ignorant.

But bating the baths and washhouses,
hempen girdles and hairy garments, we
quarrel still with the animus of Diogenes
and his train. Its social savageness was bad
enough—its spiritual insolence was worse.
The separatism—the " stand off, for I am
holier than thou"—the condemnation of a
whole world, if walking apart from his way—
the substitution of solitary exaltation for the
activity of charity—the proud judgment of
GOD'S world, and the presumptuous division
into good and evil of the Eternal;—all this
was and is of the Cynic's philosophy; and all
this is what we abjure with heart and soul, as
the main link of the chain which binds men to
cruelty, to ignorance, and to sin; for the
unloosing of which we must wait before we see
them fairly in the way of progress.

How false the religion of condemnation!—
how hardening to the heart!—how narrowing
to the sympathies! We take a section for the
whole, and swear that the illimitable All must
be according to the form of the unit I; we
make ourselves God's, and judge of the infinite
universe by the teaching of our finite senses.
They who do this most are they whom men
call " zealous for God's glory," " stern sticklers
for the truth," and " haters of latitudinarianism."
And if all the social charities are
swept down in their course, they are mourned
over gently; but only so much as if they were
sparrows lying dead beneath the blast that
slew the enemy. 'Tis a pity, say they, " that
men must be firm to the truth, yet cruel to
their fellows; but if it must be so, why, let
them fall fast as snowflakes. What is human
life, compared to the preservation of the
truth? " Ah! friends and brothers is not
the necessity of cruelty the warrantry of
falsehood? The truth of life is LOVE, and all
which negatives love is false: and every drop
of blood that ever flowed in the preservation
of any dogma, bore in its necessity the con-
demnation of that dogma.

Turn where we will, and as far backward
as we will, we ever find the spirit of the
Diogenic philosophy; and clothed, too, in
much the same garb of unseemly disorder
as that in vogue among the dog-baptised.
Ancient East gives us many parallels; and to
this day, dirty, lazy, fakirs of Hindostan
assault the olfactories, and call for curses on
the effeminacy of the cleanly and the sane.
Sometimes, though, the Diogenites assume the
scrupulosity of the Pharisee, and then they
retain only the crimes of the Inquisition, not
the habits and apparel of the Bosjesmen.
Take the sincere Pharisee, for instance;
regard his holy horror of the Samaritan (the
Independent of his day) for failing in the
strict letter of the law; hear his stern
denunciations against all sinners, be they moral
or be they doctrinal; mark the unpitying
"Crucify him! crucify him! " against Him
who taught novel doctrines of equality and
brotherhood, and the nullity of form; see the
purity of his own Pharisaic life, and grant
him his proud curse on all that are not like
unto him. He is a Cynic in his heart, one
who judges of universal humanity by the
individualism of one. Then, the hoary, hairy,
dog-baptised, who scoffed at all the decencies
of life, not to speak of its amenities, and had
no gentle Plato's pride of refinement, with all
the brutal pride of coarseness—did Diogenes
worthily represent the best functions of
manhood ? Again, the monks and friars of the
dark ages, and the hermits of old, they who
left the world of man " made in the image of
God," because they were holier than their