and get a material thing to conduce to our spiritual advantage. We cannot but think that in all the reasonings of ultra-Presbyterians on the immorality of organs, there is woven a thread of the old Gnostic heresy of the essential evil of matter; as though the same God who made our spirits capable of being impressed, had not made the material sights and sounds which are capable of impressing them. We are not afraid to argue The Organ Question' with Dr. Candlish on the highest and farthest-reaching grounds, though we think it quite sufficiently decided by the ready appeal to common sense. But what greater harm is there in using the organ's notes to waken pious thought and feeling, than in learning a lesson of our decay from the material emblem of the fading leaf, or from the lapse of the passing river? If it be not wrong to avail ourselves of the natural pensiveness of the departing light, and to go forth like Isaac in the eventide to meditate upon our most solemn concerns,-why is it sinful or degrading to turn to use the native power which the Creator has set in the organ's tones to stir tender and holy emotion? When we can get the Material to yield us any impulse upward, in God's name let us take its aid and be thankful! And as Dr. Candlish likes authorities, we shall conclude with a better authority than that of Dr. Porteous. He tells us that the organ may tickle the ear,' but denies its power to touch the heart. Milton thought otherwise and we believe that his words describe the normal influence of the organ on the healthy human mind: But let my due feet never fail To walk the studious cloister's pale; And bring all heaven before mine eyes. 344 A X. LIFE AT THE WATER CURE.* LL our readers, of course, have heard of the Water Cure; and many of them, we doubt not, have in their own minds ranked it tric medical systems which now and then spring up, among those eccenare much talked of for a while, and finally sink into oblivion. The mention of the Water Cure is suggestive of galvanism, homoeopathy, mesmerism, the grape cure, the bread cure, the mud-bath cure, and of the views of that gentleman who maintained that almost all the evils, physical and moral, which assail the constitution of man, are the result of the use of salt as an article of food, and may be avoided by ceasing to employ that poisonous and immoral ingredient. Perhaps there is a still more unlucky association with life pills, universal vegetable medicines, and the other appliances of that coarser quackery which yearly brings hundreds of gulli * A Month at Malvern, under the Water Cure. By R. J. Lane, A.E.R.A. Third Edition. Reconsidered-Rewritten. London: 1855. Spirits and Water. By R. J. L. London: 1855. Confessions of a Water-Patient. By Sir E. B. Lytton, Bart. Hints to the Sick, the Lame, and the Lazy: or, Passages in the Life of a 'ydropathist. By a Veteran. London: 1848. ble Britons to their graves, and contributes thousands of pounds in the form of stamp-duty to the revenue of this great and enlightened country. It is a curious phase of life that is presented at a Water Cure establishment. The Water Cure system cannot be carried out satisfactorily except at an establishment prepared for the purpose. An expensive array of baths is necessary; so are well-trained bath servants, and an experienced medical man to watch the process of cure: the mode of life does not suit the arrangements of a family, and the listlessness of mind attendant on the water-system quite unfits a man for any active employment. There must be pure country air to breathe, a plentiful supply of the best water, abundant means of taking exercise-Sir E. B. Lytton goes the length of maintaining that mountains to climb are indispensable ;—and to enjoy all these advantages one must go to a hydropathic establishment. It may be supposed that many odd people are to be met at such a place; strong-minded women who have broken through the trammels of the Faculty, and gone to the Water Cure in spite of the warnings of their medical men, and their friends' kind predictions that they would never live to come back; and hypochondriac men, who have tried all quack remedies in vain, and who have come despairingly to try one which, before trying it, they probably looked to as the most violent and perilous of all. And the change of life is total. You may have finished your bottle of port daily for twenty years, but at the Water Cure you must perforce practise total abstinence. For years you may never have tasted fair You may water, but here you will get nothing else to drink, and you will have to dispose of your seven or eight tumblers a day. You may have been accustomed to loll in bed of a morning till nine or ten o'clock; but here you must imitate those who would thrive, and rise at five :' while the exertion is compensated by your having to bundle off to your chamber at 9.30 P.M. long at breakfast for your hot tea, and if a Scotchman, for your grouse pie or devilled kidneys; but you will be obliged to make up with the simpler refreshment of bread and milk, with the accompaniment of stewed Normandy pippins. You may have been wont to spend your days in a fever of business, in a breathless hurry and worry of engagements to be met and matters to be seen to; but after a week under the Water Cure, you will find yourself stretched listlessly upon grassy banks in the summer noon, or sauntering all day beneath the horse-chesnuts of Sudbrook, with a mind as free from business cares as if you were numbered among Tennyson's lotos-eaters, or the denizens of Thomson's Castle of Indolence. And with God's blessing upon the pure element He has given us in such abundance, you will shortly (testibus Mr. Lane and Sir E. B. Lytton) experience other changes as complete, and more agree/able. You will find that the appetite which no dainty could tempt, now discovers in the simplest fare a relish unknown since childhood. You will find the broken rest and the troubled dreams which for years have made the midnight watches terrible, exchanged for the long refreshful sleep that makes one mouthful of the night. You will find the gloom and depression and anxiety |