APPEAL то TRUTH AND REASON. "Truth will ever be unpalatable to those who are determined not to relinquish error."-MONTAGU. He who impugns the prevailing mode of living as tending to produce disease and shorten life, and who points out the path ordained by nature as the only road to health and prolonged existence, lays himself open to no small share of reproach, not because his accusations on the one hand, and his precepts on the other, are deemed unfounded, but because he exposes to their own consciences the inconsistency and weakness of those who, in a matter of the most vital concern, habituate themselves to the violation of rules the authority of which they admit to be indisputable.* This * This, indeed, is making up their consciences as the Neapolitans do their beds, with one set of furniture for show and another for use. B enigma will allow but of one solution; namely, that men make their reason subservient to their appetites; till at length they come to regard immediate gratification as the highest good, and scruple not to indulge in any thing that inclination calls for, without regard to consequences. We need not wonder, therefore, that such men should reject every sanatory regulation that would subject them to the least restraint, and resent every attempt to lift the veil that conceals their moral deformity. It is the opposition of their habits to their convictions, that makes them so ridiculous a spectacle. It is a consciousness of the degradation into which they have allowed themselves to sink, that makes them so sensitive to the exposure of their pitiable weakness. They are in the position described by the immortal dramatist "I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching." "Unity of opinion," says the sententious author of "Lacon," "is indeed a glorious and desirable thing; and its circle cannot be too strong and extended, if the centre be truth; but, if the centre be error, the greater the circumference the greater the evil; and the strength of the parts serves |