A tray full of chemicals and three buckets of water,--
there is the raw material of my lady in the sedan chair!
It's a curious double picture, if one could but conjure
it up. On the one side, the high-born bucks, the mincing
ladies, the scheming courtiers, pushing and planning, and
striving every one of them to attain his own petty
object. Then for a jump of a hundred years. What is
this in the corner of the old vault? Margarine and
chlesterine, carbonates, sulphates, and ptomaines! We
turn from it in loathing, and as we go we carry with us
that from which we fly.
But, mind you, Bertie, I have a very high respect for
the human body, and I hold that it has been unduly
snubbed and maligned by divines and theologians:
"our gross frames" and "our miserable mortal clay" are
phrases which to my mind partake more of blasphemy than
of piety. It is no compliment to the Creator to
depreciate His handiwork. Whatever theory or belief we
may hold about the soul, there can, I suppose, be no
doubt that the body is immortal. Matter may be
transformed (in which case it may be re-transformed), but
it can never be destroyed. If a comet were to strike
this globule of ours, and to knock it into a billion
fragments, which were splashed all over the solar
system--if its fiery breath were to lick up the earth's
surface until it was peeled like an orange, still at the
end of a hundred millions of years every tiniest particle
of our bodies would exist--in other forms and
combinations, it is true, but still those very atoms
which now form the forefinger which traces these words.
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