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mates his body, it is true, but in all its other functions it is practically dead. He lives a purely natural, animal life, with all the wretchedness of the animal, and none of its contentment. Speaking of such a life holy Job says: "Man, born of woman, liveth a short time, and is filled with many miseries." For miseries come to man from the world through his body; but consolations come through his soul from religion. But in the case of your friend it is all misery and no consolation. He looks on himself as a purely material being who is born, lives and dies, and there is an end of it. By his own admission he is a mere lump of red clay, as his name originally signifies; like the old Pagan philosophers, his favorite flower is the swamp lily, to show that he, too, has sprung from the slime of the earth. Sprung from nothing by a process of conception too shameful to be thought of or talked about; an ordeal which Christ, with all His humility, was unwilling to undergo. A helpless prisoner before his birth in a filthy cell; guilty at his birth of almost a murderous attack on the mother that bore him; for years after his birth a little bundle of miseries to himself and his family. Ask the young mother what are the miseries of man's earlier years. To learn the ills all flesh is heir to, visit the parlors of a dentist, the operating-room of a hospital; count the doctors' signs in our city, the thousands of diseases and thousands of remedies, often worse than the diseases themselves. The poor envy the affluence of the rich; and the rich, the happiness of the poor; every one thinks his own station in