Life being a unity, the term “righteousness” may properly be employed for all its ranges. Its appropriateness for physical conditions will be more clearly seen when we take into account that close alliance which modern research has revealed between the bodily and spiritual states. While repudiating, on good philosophical grounds, the medical materialism of a Bichat and others, who make the moral dispositions, good or bad, an affair purely of our organic structure and functions, we nevertheless recognize, with a new clearness, the marvellous interplay between the two. What, indeed, has come about in modern thought has been, not so much the materialization of spirit as the spiritualization of matter. There is no mental change without a physical concomitant. And we never alter the conditions of our bodily life without setting in motion forces which, in a hundred subtle ways, affect for good or ill our inmost character. With all this in mind, let us examine a little how things stand in the matter of our physical righteousness. A glance only is needed to reveal an extraordinary condition of things. On all sides we find people, of acutely sensitive consciences in what are called moral questions, in this other direction living in flattest rebellion. Let us take a single example of the matter of the air we breathe. The mass of us here are flouting nature every day, and reaping the consequences. We are hearing just now of wonders being wrought by what is called the open-air cure. The consumptive, instead of being dosed with medicines, is dosed with pure air, and gets well under the treatment. What a hint for the rest of us! There are more than consumptives who need this régime. The truth is, under the modern conditions of industrialism and great cities, we are all of us semi-invalids, and there is only one way of curing us. The English people are suffering a famine of fresh air. The population is dwindling visibly before our eyes. Over seventy per cent of us are shut up in towns, and if any one would know what that means, let him make a simple calculation. The most constant and important of our physical operations is breathing. Moment by moment, by day and by night, sleeping and waking, it perpetually goes on. And every one of the innumerable breaths we draw in the course of a day, according to its quality, whether pure or impure, whether full of ozone or laden with poisonous elements, is telling on our whole nature, making its influence felt on our every organ, our every thought, and the whole quality of our feeling. What will be the sum total of effect here in the course of a year;12what upon the length and effectiveness of our life? And yet we are most of us regulating our life, or having it regulated for us, as though such a consideration were of no importance at all. We cannot grow decent flowers in the heart of a city, but we think we can grow men. The modern world will have to find speedily some substitute for, or at least some amelioration of, its town and factory system, or it will perish of inanition. Nature’s demands here are too imperative; her penalties for neglect are too appalling. The business of a state, as Thucydides said long ago, is not so much to produce this or that product as to grow men. And you can grow them only in the open air. In the meantime, why is it that such multitudes of us, who are under no economic compulsions, are yet, from sheer indifference, breaking every day this law of physical righteousness? The strange thing is that those we should naturally regard as guides should be so often among the worst offenders. Look at our clerical, our journalist, our literary classes! They are a legion of pale faces. Their records are full of breakdowns. They give us a dyspeptic theology, and a pessimist literature. And the reason is that so many of them are living just below the level of a healthy view and output. And yet so small a change would often turn the scale. Has not an eminent authority assured us that the difference between happiness and misery is the difference between the spending habitually of one farthing less instead of one farthing more than our weekly income? That is true of our nerve income as well as of that in pounds and pence. And yet, we repeat, so small a change of habit would rehabilitate our nerve bankrupts. Why cannot preachers and writers do their work out of doors? When a caller at Wordsworth’s house asked to see his study, the servant pointed him to the woods and hills outside. They formed the best possible study, and Wordsworth’s use of it accounted largely, we do not doubt, both for the quality of his work and for the length of his life. It is an example for every brain worker to follow. A trained mind can concentrate just as easily outside as within walls, and its thought will be fresher, because fed every moment with better air. It is a régime for almost all weathers. In the winter a man may read or write as he walks, if need be. At all hazards let him be, through the seasons, a Nature’s man, taking alike her buffets and her smiles. She will reward him a hundredfold. We have touched only one department of physical righteousness, but there are so many others. There is the question of our food and drink. The new conviction of sin of which we have spoken will cut here in many directions. It will smite the ascetic not less than the man of excess. For its standard is the highest physical efficiency, and it will reject as a delusion and a snare the notion that any spiritual excellence can be secured by starving and neglecting the body. On the other hand, the new consciousness will war decisively against the present cult of the stomach. It is certain that multitudes of our ‘well-to-do’ are physically most ill-to-do from their eating habits. Their high living is really very low living. They will never get to the heights with the loads they carry. And if that is true of eating, still more is it of drinking. Some day, surely, we shall invent a better drink than alcohol. It is good neither for work nor play. As to the former, we may take Huxley’s dictum. Asked about its use as a stimulant for mental work, his reply was: “I would just as soon take a dose of arsenic as I would of alcohol under such circumstances.” And for play, his own experience may be also cited: “I am as jolly as a sandboy so long as I live on a minimum and drink no alcohol.” Plainly, for its way upward, society wants a new doctrine and a new conscience of the body.—The Christian World.