I

IX.

THE NAKED TRUTH.

TAKE as a text this morning some remarkable words of Paul in his second letter to the Corinthians. Speaking of the spiritual man, he says: "For we know that if our fleshly tabernacle were dissolved we have a divine structure, a house not made with hands, eternal, heavenly. Earnestly we desire to be clothed upon with our heavenly frame, so that being thus clothed we shall not be found naked; we would not be unclothed but clothed upon, that mortality may be swallowed up in life."

There is a common phrase taken originally from Shakespeare the "Naked Truth." It is used as descriptive of the simple, pure, unadulterated truth, the final absolute truth. The method of arriving at it is to strip off what are called its disguises, whether foul or fair, and get as near as possible to the bare skeleton of literal fact. Analysis is the method; the scalpel is the instrument. The same rule applied to ordinary every-day knowledge would lead to odd results. What if one were to seek the naked truth respecting an apple-tree by digging down into its roots, or of an oak by pulling to pieces an acorn! Suppose that to discover the naked truth respecting a harvest-field, a man of science, instead of visiting the barns where the product is stored, were to pull up the stubble and dissect the underground fibres! To learn the truth about a grape

vine, we weigh its clusters and taste their juice; to learn the truth about an orangery, we count and suck the oranges. We speak of the "naked eye." The naked eye is the eye unaided by artificial lenses, the eye unassisted by telescope or microscope, the natural eye. But have not these fine instruments by which the power of the eye is augmented become a part of it? Do they not invest or clothe the organ with new attributes? Do these instruments impoverish the eye or enrich it? Is vision increased by them or diminished? Certainly it is increased; these contrivances supplement the organ, make it more sensitive to the sunbeam, enable it to comply more fully with the laws of light. Fancy the telescope and microscope abolished, and none but "naked" eyes left to mankind, should we be nearer the truth about the eye than we are at present? Would the disappearance of astronomy on the one hand and of physiology on the other, the vanishing of the infinitely great and of the infinitely little, add to our knowledge of the laws of vision? The natural organ is the basis on which the noble science of optics builds. It is most truly itself when it is clothed upon by its heavenly house.

Nature abhors the naked truth and always clothes it when she can. She loves the garment of tender verdure, the investiture of roses and lilies, the splendor of forests. She is fond of presenting herself in state. Where will you find an unclothed rock or stone? Not in forest or field; perhaps in some wilderness of sand, as in Africa or Arabia, where the winds blow the seeds of verdure away, or the scorching sunbeams dry them up. Travellers across our continent describe rocks cut and polished by wind and sand, on whose smooth surfaces the most tenacious plant has no chance to maintain its hold. But wherever else you find a stone, large or small, it is covered with the fine

lace-work of the lichen, which is the beginning of vegetation, so fine that only keen eyes can see its tracery; atop of this is laid the soft mantle of moss, tender and green, with its pretty flowers and its wonderful imitations of forest growths; as if this were not enough, thick layers of soil are added, a still richer clothing for the skeleton ; shrubbery of many kinds makes the concealment more effectual still, and at last the pine, the ash, and the oak, glorify the whole. The whole is nature's product, and as a whole it must be studied. To learn the naked truth about the rock that serves as a base to the forest or the grain-field, this magnificent mass of integument must be taken off, the unclothed stone must be disclosed; but to learn the full truth about the region, every stage of natural growth must be noted. Nature is impatient of nakedness. A great writer standing before a nude statue in the workshop of a modern sculptor in Rome, expresses the opinion that the day of such work is gone by. It was well enough for the Greeks to make nude statues of men and women, calling them gods and goddesses; the ancient men of Greece wore little drapery, lived much in the open air, and were frequently, in the gymnasium or at the public games, stripped of their garments. But the modern man is always clothed: his clothes are part of himself; he is known by his clothes; they express his sense of beauty, fitness, propriety; they convey his individuality; they present him; we do not know him without them. The great painters made much account of the costume of their subjects, the satin, velvet, fur, even the jewels in ring and brooch which were sparkles from the inward character. To learn the naked truth about a man, one would hardly think it wise to wait till he was dead, and we could obtain his skeleton; one might wait till he was dead, but in order to get as far away from the skeleton as possible, in order

to gather up all that had grown about the man in the course of his life, and so to bring out the full personality, the accumulated results of a lifetime are important as exhibitions of character. The exterior clothes the interior.

The point I aim at establishing is this: The naked truth is not the pure truth, but the rudimental truth. Mr. Darwin undertakes to prove that the progenitor of man was the ape. Let us concede the sufficiency of his proof. That, let us admit, is the naked truth respecting the animal we call man. There was a time when his ancestors possessed caudal extremities and perched in trees, travelling over the ground when they had occasion, with bodies prone, and grubbing roots out of the soil. But that was, according to Mr. Darwin, many thousands of years ago. To get at his aboriginal naked progenitor, he digs down through layer on layer of humanity the depth of all those ages, peeling off accretions without number. There at the bottom is the naked truth. But a great many things have happened since then. The ape has become a very different creature, so different that it is only at moments and in rare cases that the consanguinity is suspected between him and the human race. He stands on two feet now, erect, with upright spine and trunk, the spine a column and not a horizontal conduit for transmitting sensations, and that change alone indicates and makes a new creature. Every physical organ, from highest to lowest, acquires a different relative position, and with that, new expansion and increased function; the arms and hands are freed for use; the claws become fingers, endowed with nerves of exquisite sensibility. The head is newly poised, and in consequence is rendered capable of new motions. Its shape alters by virtue of its erect position; the features become handsome; the countenance, no longer kept down near the earth with back-head upwards but raised to meet the light that streams

from above, falls into harmonious proportions; the brow expands; the dome of the skull rounds grandly out; the intellectual part predominates over the animal, and varied expressions of feeling play over the formerly impassive and imperturbable surface. The vital centres draw sustenance from fresh sources; the influences of air and light tell on the frame with greatly augmented force; instead of crouching low down to the earth, the vital parts hidden by the mass of the trunk, its eyes searching the ground, the creature moves through higher strata of atmosphere. The entire body has an equal chance at the quickening powers, the eye sweeps the horizon, the uplifted forehead is bathed in the upper air; the firmament is revealed; the look pierces the celestial spaces; the all-covering heavens drop their grandeur upon the creature; the direct ray strikes the level vision; the brain swells, its substance acquires finer texture, its convolutions multiply; it becomes an organ of intelligence, sensitive to impressions inconceivably more numerous and inconceivably more delicate than the maturest ape catches; images are there of objects the chimpanzee can never behold; currents of sensation wind and play which the gorilla is no more aware of than the Sphynx of Egypt is aware of the breezes that blow the light sand from its back. In the long process of centuries, the ape has been clothed upon with many attributes of flesh and blood, every lineament and fibre of him has been transformed, his very skin has become a garment so exquisite in quality that it resembles the original membrane about as nearly as the hair shirt of the Baptist resembled Paul's spiritual body. To learn the simple truth about man, all this must be taken into account. The most perfect specimen of the race tells the purest truth about the race. The last acquisition contributes to the last judgment. To know the full truth respecting