This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II. CONSCIENTIOUS ABUSE OF THE BODY. " What power of prince or penal law, be it never so strict, could enforce men to do that which for conscience's sake they will voluntarily undergo ? " Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy. " Farewell, a long farewell to thee, Arran of my heart Paradise is with thee; the garden of God within the sound of thy bells. The angels love Arran. Each day an angel conies there to join in its services." St. Columra. I AM to set in array some painful points, appertaining to wrongs conscientiously done to the flesh for the supposed good of the spirit. That quotation from Columbkill, or Saint Columba, the hermit of Arran, a bleak, wild island outside Galway Bay, in the Atlantic, ? Saint Columba, who could sing a plaintive farewell on leaving the spot where, " with the wind whistling through the loose stones, and the sea-spray hanging on his hair," he had abused his body for what he thought to be the welfare of his soul, ? is certainly not pleasantly suggestive. The story of religious austerity is a dismal one, for it is the story of " inhuman wisdom." I shall not attempt to relate it, but shall simply place before the mind of the reader some of the things which give a pitiful remarkableness to its contents. There have been persons, not a few but many, who conceived it to be their duty to withhold all respect and all culture from their organic frames. Curious is the inquiry, how the God-created form has been, under imagined divine approval, abused,? how men, hungering and thirsting after what they sincerely believed to be righteousness, have cruelly denied it and oppressed it, macerated and marred it. In prosecuting this inquiry, one quickly meets the general fact, that body-abusing saints, more than ten thousand in number, have miserably lived an...