Part 24

Like a central operator with a million wires leading to him, your INDIVIDUALITY, a wonderful mystery without form, matter or name, sits in your brain guiding the body. ----

Where did the body come from?

Part of it came from potatoes grown on Long Island, and part of it from spices grown in Ceylon.

In your nerves there is the extract of tea leaves gathered by a Chinese girl on the other side of the world. Your blood is purified and made red by the wind that blew across the Rocky Mountains only a few hours ago. That current of oxygen has helped build up your strength.

A month ago an ox was eating grass in Texas.

Many millions of years ago the pollen of huge fern trees was falling to the earth in the carboniferous era and making coal.

To-day, part of the backbone of the ox from Texas with the meat attached is laid on the fire of coal made by those fern trees, and the Texas ox and the fern pollen combined help to build up your body.

That same body is three-quarters water, and of that water part was once the Pacific Ocean; part, perhaps, was drunk up by a whale before it reached you; and part floated in clouds over the Southern Sea. ----

Your imagination can carry the picture as far as it will--to the fisherman catching your sardines in the North, and the dark man gathering your oranges in the South or your dates in some oasis.

We want to suggest this idea to you.

Since the body is gathered from all parts of the world, from all corners of our little speck of the material universe, should it not be scattered, at death, as it was gathered during life?

Is not the destruction of the body by fire far better than hideous burial in the earth?

The body that fire destroys goes back to nature, instantly reduced to its original elements. Is not such disposition of the body more in accord with nature's laws and with respect for the dead than our present custom?

Would it not be pleasanter to think that one we cared for had gone back to the air, with only a handful of ashes remaining, than to think of the dark, close, lonesome grave far below the sunlight, clogging and uselessly occupying part of the earth, which should be devoted to growth and cheerfulness?

HOW MARRIAGE BEGAN HAPHAZARD REFLECTIONS ON GRAVE TOPICS.

At stated times we mortals have stated visitations.

One day it is the grippe, next day the financial problem.

Just now it is the marriage and divorce question, with much learned expounding by the good and the pure, such as bishops and members of Sorosis. ----

What is marriage? How did it begin? Whence does it come?

Why is it a feature of human life wherever that life is found.

You must begin with such questions. Always study beginnings. Nothing can be learned by taking hold of a thing in the middle and examining its imperfections.

The first priest to join man and woman together was no benign being with lawn sleeves and soul-stirring words.

Marriage was brought about on this earth by the will and wisdom of God Almighty working through primitive babyhood.

In the old days, when the world was cruder, men and women ran wild through forests and swamps. They fought nature, fought each other, as savage as other beasts around them. There was no love; there was no marriage. The instincts of self-preservation and of reproduction worked alone to keep the race here through its hard childhood. ----

But in cold stone caves or in rough nests under fallen tree trunks savage children were born and nursed by their savage mothers with savage affection.

Through those infants of the stone age, or of ages much earlier, marriage and pure affection came into the world.

It is not hard to reproduce in our minds the picture of the first marriage.

A savage woman, half human, half ape, with rough, matted locks hanging round her face, sits holding her new-born baby, protecting it from wind and cold.