Bosom

“ She had torn open her habit, and her bosom was half exposed. The weapon's point rested upon her left breast: and, oh! that was such a breast! The moon-beams darting full upon it enabled the monk to observe its dazzling whiteness: his eye dwelt with insatiable avidity upon the beauteous orb: a sensation till then unknown filled his heart with a mixture of anxiety and delight; ”

“ Nevertheless, I will say that Matanzas is lovely,—with the fair harbor on one hand and the fair hills on the other, sitting like a mother between two beautiful daughters, who looks from one to the other and wonders which she loves best. The air from the water is cool and refreshing, the sky is clear and open, and the country around seems to beckon one to the green bosom of its shades. ”

“ Lively as any new-born butterfly, not like a butterfly’s, flitting and hovering, was her flight, for still, like one that longed, she sped and strained and flew. The joy of bare life swelled in Florimel’s bosom. She looked up, she looked around, she breathed deep. The cloudy anger that had rushed upon her like a watching tiger the moment she waked, fell back, and left her soul a clear mirror to reflect God’s dream of a world. She turned, and saw Malcolm at the tiller, and the cloudy wrath sprang upon her. ”

“ There all was silence and darkness. With trembling hands she found her match-box and struck a light, uttering all the time every soothing word she could think of, while her heart quavered in momentary terror of another shriek. It came just as the match flamed up in her fingers, and an answering shriek from her bosom tore its way through her clenched teeth, and she shuddered like one in an ague. There sat her brother on the edge of the bedstead staring before him with fixed eyes and terror-stricken countenance. ”

“ It is the germ or seed, so to speak, of animal life; in it is contained all that is necessary for the formation of the perfect living creature; in that little oval case lie snugly packed up, bones, and muscles, and sinews, and all the delicate parts, organs, as they would be called, from a Greek word signifying an instrument, thus the tongue is an organ of speech, the eye of sight, and so on. But all these organs are in an undeveloped state, as the flower is in the bud; develope is a French word, and signifies to unroll, or unfold. The animal is there in embryo ”

“ But in the sense of the divine Scripture both are proved to live after the flesh. For by flesh it means not only the body of a terrestrial and mortal animal, as when it says, "All flesh is not the same flesh, but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, another of birds," [2] but it uses this word in many other significations; and among these various usages, a frequent one is to use flesh for man himself, the nature of man taking the part for the whole, as in the words, "By the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified;" ”

“ Little by little the flesh sinks in and grows watery; the organs cease to be distinguishable. Every thing is seized upon by what is termed putridity. If the tissues are examined under the microscope at this moment, we no longer recognize any of the anatomical elements of which the organic fabric is made up in its normal state. "Our flesh," Bossuet exclaims in his funeral-sermon on Henrietta of England, "soon changes its nature, our body takes another name; even that of a corpse, used because it still exhibits something of the human figure, does not long remain with it. ”

“ Thus does the holy blessed God: he first buries our bodies under the earth, where they putrefy and corrupt, that nothing remains but that one bone: from this a new body is produced, which is indeed a body, but not a perfect body. But in that great day, when all bodies are hidden in the earth, and the soul departs, then even that bone decays, and the body which was formed out of it remains, and is as the light of the sun, and the splendor of heaven. ”

“ We must not be proud of our bodies, because the matter is from the earth, yet not dishonour our bodies, because the mould and shape are from the divine wisdom. The formation of human bodies in the womb is described by an elegant similitude (v. 10, Thou hast poured me out like milk, which is coagulated into cheese) , and by an induction of some particulars, v. 11. Though we come into the world naked, yet the body is itself both clothed and armed. The skin and flesh are its clothing; the bones and sinews are its armour, not offensive, but defensive. ”

“ If the human body had been made at once out of hand, it would not have been there. How came it, then? It is the rudimentary remnant of an organ—a greatly enlarged cæcum—which has served, and in some mammals still serves, a useful purpose. All these cases are survivals; they are organs which, like many customs in society, have outlived their usefulness, but still continue by heredity. ”

“ For the body, which consists of bones and flesh, takes its beginning from the seed of a man, which is extracted from the marrow by warmth, and conveyed into the womb as into a soil, to which it adheres, and is gradually moistened from the fountain of the blood, and so is changed into flesh and bones, and is formed into the likeness of him who injected the seed. ”

“ For, if the Word be really made flesh, and we really receive the Word as flesh, in the food of the Lord, how is He not to be thought to remain in us naturally, since, both in being born a man, He assumed the nature of our flesh, never to be severed from Him, and has joined the nature of His flesh to the eternal nature under the sacrament of the flesh to be communicated to us. ”

“ I have thus shown the various classes of bodies as they are diversified by their forms and combinations and changes into one another, and now I must endeavour to set forth their affections and the causes of them. In the first place, the bodies which I have been describing are necessarily objects of sense. But we have not yet considered the origin of flesh, or what belongs to flesh, or of that part of the soul which is mortal. ”

“ The outer or animal layer, or ectoderm, always forms the chief organs of animal life—the skin, nervous system, sense-organs, etc.; the inner or vegetal layer, or entoderm, gives rise to the chief organs of vegetative life—the organs of nourishment, digestion, blood-formation, etc. ”

“ The Lord asked him whether these bones could live, and he answered, "Thou knowest." Then the Lord told him to prophesy upon these bones, and as he prophesied, there was a noise and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone, the sinews and the flesh came upon them, and the skin covered them above, but there was no breath in them. ”

“ God has covered your bones with flesh. Your flesh is soft and warm. In your flesh there is blood. God has put skin outside, and it covers your flesh and blood like a coat. Now all these things, the bones, and flesh, and blood, and skin, are called your body. ”

“ One of his favourite arguments—and it is a weighty one, though neglected by the orthodox Darwinians—is that living substance is capable, under similar stimuli, of developing spontaneously and afresh, at quite different points and in different groups, similar organs, such as spots sensitive to light, accumulations of pigment, eye-spots, lenses, complete eyes, and similarly with the notochord, the excretory organs, and the like. Therefore homology of organs is no proof of their hereditary affiliation.28 They rather illustrate “iterative evolution.” ”

“ On this analogy, many have suggested that every organ in the body—we must go further, and say that every marked feature in every organ in the body—is represented in the germ by a seed which can grow, under favourable circumstances, into just such another organ or feature of an organ. ”

“ A physiologist is as sure that every germ, every ovum, in the Invertebrate animals, was produced by an animal of a former generation, as he is of the same fact in a Mammal, where his eye can see the scar of the umbilical cord. ”

“ Rudimentary Organs.—But, strangely enough, the course of development in any higher organism is not straightforward, but devious. Instead of organs being produced in the most direct manner, unexpected by-paths are followed, as when all higher animals acquire gill-clefts and many other rudi [Pg 196] mentary organs not adapted to their condition of life. Most of the rudimentary organs are transitory, and bear testimony, as hereditary survivals, to the line of ancestry. ”

“ As to what the apostle says concerning flesh and blood not inheriting the kingdom of heaven, he does not mean thereby that our bodies shall be so changed, that they shall in no respect consist of flesh and blood: And when he speaks of celestial and spiritual bodies, it is not necessary for us to suppose, that hereby he intends ærial or etherial bodies. But this will be more particularly considered under a following head, when we speak of the circumstances in which the bodies of believers shall be raised from the dead. ”

“ Some also hold the hypothesis, that the seed of an animal is in substance the foam of the blood, which being by the natural heat of the male agitated and shaken out, in copulation is turned into foam, and deposited in the seminal veins. ”

“ From whom else, I ask again, can they come? Can they come from our bodies? Our bodies? What are they?—Flesh and bones, made up of air and water and earth,—out of the dead bodies of the animals, the dead roots and fruits of plants which we eat. ”

“ Of such clews—which are really mere traces, and nothing more—there are no better examples than the curious fragments of structures found in many animals and plants, and named "rudimentary organs." An animal or plant is thus found to possess a mere trace of an organ or part which, so far as the highest exercise of human judgment may decide, is of not the slightest utility to the being. ”

“ For every structure, therefore, there is a period of emergence from something more general. The earliest discernible germ of any part or organ may be called its primordium. In this sense the ovum is the primordium of the individual, the primitive outer tissue the primordium of all structures of the skin and nervous system, the primitive inner layer of the intestine and all structures connected with it, etc. ”

“ Hence, when he returns to organisms, it does not surprise us that he assigns to ova and spermatozoa cell-souls, to the impregnated ovum germ-soul, to plants tissue-souls, to animals nerve-souls; or that he regards man’s body and soul as born together in the impregnated ovum, and gradually evolved from the bodies and souls of lower animals. ”

“ But in man it is a mere rudiment, not only of no possible aid in digestion, but the source of frequent disease, and even of death.
There are in all, according to Darwin, about eighty vestigial organs in the human body. But these organs occur everywhere throughout the animal kingdom. ”

“ According to recent lore, successive generations do not begin with the birth of new individuals, or personalities, but with the formation of the nucleus, or egg, whence one or more of those individualities subsequently emerge; and we must therefore look upon the simple ovum as the germ, the starting-point, of the most complicated corporeal structures, including those which we call human. ”

“ If the dissection of a developed body were a crime to be thus punished, how much more dreadful must it have seemed to deal with the embryonic body still enclosed in the womb, which the Creator himself had decently veiled from the curiosity of the scientist! ”

“ For, from the circumstance that it is the diffusion of the blood throughout the whole flesh which produces life in the flesh, they assert that this soul, which is said to be the life of all flesh, is contained in the blood. This statement, moreover, that the flesh struggles against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh ”

“ Such are the properties, then, of vein, sinew and skin, of fibre and membrane, of hair, nail, claw and hoof, of horns, of teeth, of beak, of gristle, of bones, and of parts that are analogous to any of the parts here enumerated.
Part 16 Flesh, and that which is by nature akin to it in sanguineous animals, is in all cases situated in between the skin and the bone, or the substance analogous to bone; for just as spine is a counterpart of bone, so is the flesh-like substance of animals that are constructed a spinous system the counterpart of the flesh of animals constructed on an osseous one. ”

“ A wonderful device of Nature’s also is this—that, when the foetus is alive, the os uteri is closed with perfect accuracy, but if it dies, the os at once opens up to the extent which is necessary for the foetus to make its exit. ”

“ For since the construction and preservation of the organism, and of every organ in particular, is owing to specific scents, we may fairly look upon disease in general as a disturbance of the specific scent of the organism, and upon disease of a particular organ of the body, as a disturbance of the specific scent pertaining to that particular organ. We have been hitherto in the habit of holding the protoplasm responsible for all phenomena of disease. We have now come to learn that what acts in the protoplasm are the scents ”

“ When the apostle speaks of the body, what he means is the animal life—that which we share in common with beasts, birds, and reptiles; for our life my Christian brethren—our sensational existence—differs but little from that of the lower animals. There is the same external form, the same material in the blood-vessels, in the nerves, and in the muscular system. ”

“ Proving the Reality of the Flesh Which Was Truly Born, and Died, and Rose Again.
But let this suffice on our present subject; for I think that by this time proof enough has been adduced of the flesh in Christ having both been born of the virgin, and being human in its nature. ”