Chapter 20. The Complete Works of Bran, the Iconoclast, Volume 1 by William Cowper Bran. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Rita Butros. Chapter 20. Looking Backward When it comes to looking backward, Bellamy isn't in it a little bit with Professor Hermann V. Hillprecht. The retrospective glance of the latter covers a period of at least 11,000 years. And what is of infinitely more importance? It is that of a learned paleologist instead of a sensation mongering empiric. The professor has succeeded in lifting a corner of that black veil which hangs between the prehistoric and the present in affording us a fleeting glimpse of our fellow man as he appeared long ages before the birth of Abraham. He has demonstrated that man has been a civilized animal much longer than is popularly supposed. That at least 5,000 years before the supposed advent of Adam, he not only lived sociably in cities and had gods and kings but was able to read and write. For 8 years past, the professor and his co-laborers under the patronage of the University of Pennsylvania have been carrying on their explorations. The site of Nippur, the ancient capital of Kengi, later known as Babylonia, is the scene of their labors. Hitherto Nippur has been supposed to have been the world's oldest city but the excavations made not only prove that it rose upon the ruins of others but affords some knowledge of a long line of kings who lived so long ago that their very names were forgotten before the flight of the Israelites from Egypt or even the building of the Tower of Babel. What is the story of this buried past where all its doors flung wide for us to search its rooms and we to see the race from first to last and how they lived and died? Sargon is the most ancient Chaldean monarch mentioned in the Bible and Hitherto archeologists have agreed that he was a fiction but the professor has not only proven that he had a habitation as well as a name but has cataloged some 30 of his predecessors. Science has amply demonstrated the existence of man upon the earth long before the Sisozoic era of the Biblical cosmogony but Professor Hilprecht is the first to demonstrate the high antiquity of his civilization. To the average man this will appear neither more interesting nor profitable than a two-headed calf or petrified corpse but to the philosophic mind it affords much food for reflection. We have presumed that we could trace the history of man back to the time when he began to practice the art of writing as distinguished from the transference of thought by crude pictorials that our prehistoric progenitor was simply a savage. It now appears that people may build indestructible temples and kings and priests write intelligently on imperishable material and the nation be as utterly forgotten as though it had never existed. With these facts in mind it were curious to speculate on what the world 11,000 years hence will know of our now famous men such for instance as Cleveland and McKinley. What will the historian of that far away time have to say of Mark Hanna? Printing has been called the art preservative but is it? Suppose the priests of Bell that deity who antedates by so many centuries the Jewish Jehovah had committed the history of their temples to cold type instead of graving it upon sacred vases would Professor Hilprecht and other Assyriologists be deciphering it today? Printing has substituted flimsy paper for parchment just as the pen substituted parchment for waxen tablets as the stylus substituted the latter for the far more enduring leaflet of torrified clay. Imagine the effect of 11,000 years upon a modern library. Where will the archaeologist of the year 12,896 turn for the history of our time? Where search for those few immortal names that were not born to die? Oral transmission of historic data such as prevails among savages, such as prevailed among the Hellenes in the age of Homer has been supplanted by the press. Long before Macaulay's New Zealander stands on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's every book now extant will have perished. Will they be continuously reproduced and thus like the human race itself run ever on? In Sabay eras of barbarism have overtaken civilizations as pretentious as our own, intellectual nights in which the patiently acquired learning of ages was lost. Petrifaction as in China, retrogression begotten of luxury as in Athens, submersion beneath an avalanche of human debris as in Rome, ignorance breeding despoilation as in Ireland. These be the lions in the path of civilization. No race or nation of which we have any record has avoided a recrudescence of barbarism for an hundred generations. A few centuries of our wasting climate obliterates inscriptions on brass and wrecks the proudest monuments of marble. The recently imported Egyptian obelisk which stood for ages on Nile's plain is already falling into ruins. We can scarcely cipher the deep-cut epitaphs of the pilgrim fathers. The mansion of the sire is uninhabitable for the sun. The history of McKinley's promised era of progress and prosperity will be written by the press reporter, that busy literature who has neither yesterday nor tomorrow. Some subsidized biographer may bind McKinley up in calf and chance preserve a stray copy for some centuries, then goodbye to all his greatness.  Adams and Hancock and Franklin are paling stars despite our printing presses have become little more than idle words in the schoolboys lexicon. Our proud republic, our boasted civilization will pass for change is the order of the universe. What records will they leave behind? What is to prevent them being as utterly forgotten as were Sargon's predecessors? Here and there, the delver of far years will find the fragment of a wall per chance an inscription carved in stone and protected by chance from the gnawing tooth of time. And from these prosperity will construct for us a history in which we will appear perhaps as the straggling vanguard of civilization instead of heirs of all the ages. They may dig up a petrified dude and figure out that we were a species of anthropoid ape learnedly proclaim us as the missing link. Suppose that by some mischance a picture of the new woman in bloomers and be stride a bike should be preserved would posterity accept her as its progenitor or class her as a luscious natura per chance and hermaphrodite. A few coins will doubtless be discovered and the excavators avoid the Texas Treasury and triumphant populism take it for granted that twas on these curious discs that our infant industry cut its teeth. The in God we trust inscription may be regarded as a barbaric hoodoo to prevent infantile bellyache or the evil eye. But the dollar mark will be entirely unintelligible to a people so many thousand years removed by such superstition of metallic money. Of course woman will have ruled the world so long that tyrant men will be regarded as a sun myth and the goddess of liberty on our coins be mistaken for portraits of our female monarchs. Thus will Cleveland and McKinley like Hippolyta and other amazons of old be passed down to remote prosperity in petticoats. This type from which the New York Journal prints its portraits of Mark Hanna should be found among the tumuliae of Manhattan Island it were well worth remaining alive until that time to hear the curious speculation of craniological cranks. Should the paleologists unearth the world building they will find in the basement an imperishable object about the size of a bushel basket that will puzzle them not a little but which his contemporaries could readily inform them was the gall bag of Joseph Fulitzer's circulation liar. The discovery of editor Dana's office cat nicely embalmed may get us accredited with the worship of Phyllis domestica Aelius cream canner as a judgment for our persistent slander of the ancient Egyptians. But seriously is it not a trifle but a startling to reflect of how little real importance all our feverish work and worry is and how small a space it is ordained to occupy in the mighty epic of mankind. Here we have been fretting, fuming and even fighting for months past to save the country only to learn that it will in no wise stay saved is hastening rapidly on to the tomb of the world's history and in turn through that gloomy sepulcher of countless nations into the great inane the eternal void, the all embracing night of utter nothingness. With all our patriotism and scandal piping our boasting and our battlefields our solemn declarations and labored constitutions we are but constructing a house of cards. The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces the solemn temples, the great globe itself yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve and like this insubstantial pageant faded leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made of and our little life is rounded with a sleep. We devote our energies to the propagation of a religion which reason that pitiless monarch of the mind tells us must as inevitably passes did those of Isis and Bell and Sibel leaving in the earth's all absorbing bosom only a few shattered altars and broken feigns. We are striving to win and wear the immortals only to be told that mighty empires have passed from the memory of mankind and proud kings who may have ruled the world sunk into the far depths of time and been forgotten. We divide into classes industrial and set social and give pride free reign to vaunt herself knowing that the hour will surely come when not even a hill-prec can distinguish between the prince's ashes and the pauper's dust can eat so much as say this cold dead earth or which lizards crawl and from which springs the poisonous worm a noxious weed once lived and loved. We busy ourselves about the style of a coat or the cut of a corsage. We dispute and end our faiths and plan new follies. We struggle for wealth that we may flaunt a petty opulence in our fellow's faces and win the envy of fools and the span of life but three score and ten while a thousand years are but as one tick of the horology of time. We quarrel about our political creeds and religious cults as though it's made any difference whether we wore white or yellow badges sacrificed at the shrine of Jupiter or worshipped in the temples of Jehovah. Why so hot little man? Look up, thou seeest that sun? Tis the same that shone on this debris when it was the throbbing metropolis of a world. The self-same moon that looks so peacefully down smiled on the midnight trist in Nipper's scented groves or Babylon's hanging gardens. The same stars that now fret Heaven's black vault with astral fire winked and blinked eleven thousand years ago while the sandaled feet of youth on polished cedar floors beat out the rhythmic passion of its blood. There, too, were the heaven of requited love and the hell of breaking hearts. There, too, were women beauties as the dawn and ambitious men grasping with eager hands at what they fondly thought the ever-fabulous bays. There, too, were crowned kings and fashions sumptuous courts, chanting priests and tearful penitents the same farce tragedy of life and death and now an unsightly heap of rubbish marks this once bright theater in which prince and pauper each played his part marks it and nothing more.  How small we are, how ephemeral, how helpless in God's great hand. Is it not strange that we do not cling each to the others like shipwrecked mariners riding the stormy waters on some frail raft and looking with dilating eyes into the black abyss? That we waste our little lives in wild wars and civic strife? That all our souls are concentrated in that one word, selfishness? That we have time to hate? If history be philosophy teaching by example, what lesson does Professor Hilprecht bring us from the chronicles of those kings who died 5,000 years before that garden was planted eastward in Aden? End of Chapter 20 Looking Backward Chapter 21 Of the Complete Works of Bran The Iconoclast, Volume 1 by William Cowper Bran This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Rita Butros. Chapter 21 Are Women Devoid of Desire? Perhaps a religious periodical like the Iconoclast should avoid a question of such delicacy, should leave it to the medical magazines which may speak as plainly as they please, even in the presence of the proverbial young person, now deep in the study of physiology and even assaying the practice of therapeutics. My quarrel, however, is with these same medical magazines, which delight in discovering mare's nests for no other apparent purpose than to make mankind uncomfortable. They will persist in disregarding the time-honored axiom that everybody knows more than anybody, a truism which Dr. Spar elaborated in his declaration that the common observation of common people is more trustworthy than the statistical investigations of the most unprejudiced expert, even though he be a distinguished MD. I have before me an essay by George Troupe Maxwell, MD of Florida, read before the Association of Doctors and printed with evident approval by the Virginia Medical Semi-Monthly. Like most gentlemen of his profession, Dr. Maxwell discusses matters of the utmost delicacy with refreshing freedom, an example which I must follow to some extent if I would expose his fallacies. Hence the young person, unless indeed she be studying to become a doctor or a writer of realistic fiction, is solemnly adjured to dive no deeper here. Dr. Maxwell makes several startling assertions from which I, albeit a doctor of divinity instead of medicine, must emphatically dissent. I make no apology for so doing, for it is the time-honored prerogative of preachers to speak ex-cathedra on all questions, whether religious, scientific or political. The pulpit is to all other professions what philosophy is to the various schools of science. Exercises supervisory power and, by a tap here and a prod there, makes them consentiant with its own infallible scheme of things, so to speak. It is a very trying occupation, yet some complain that we Parsons must have our summer vacation on full pay and nurse our precious health at swell hotels while common people feed on potatoes and plant and grow six-cent cotton for the benefit of the contribution plate. But from of old there have been more boast people ever ready to criticize the holy and put cockaburrs in the back hair of the pure in heart. The salient features of Dr. Maxwell's essay may be summarized as follows. Sexually considered, civilized man is more bestial than the brutes. He does not respect the person of his gestant wife and this disregard of natural law is the most potent failure in the curtailment of natural increase. Certain physiological facts indicate that woman is destitute of desire. Carpenter, the great English scientist, is quoted in support of this proposition and a female lecturer of distinction, name not given, to establish the theory that the chief cause of marital unhappiness and the ill health of wives is the sexual inhumanity of husbands, such inhumanity being quite as common among the better as among the uncultured. The foregoing is as delicately as I can state propositions of such far-reaching importance and which neither Dr. Maxwell nor the female lecturer of distinction treat in a manner at all mealy-mouthed. Even after exhausting my stock of euphemisms, the recital appears risque enough to alarm more than one lady reader and I am tempted to turn back. But courage, good soul, there's nobody looking and if we must live it is important that we learn. The proper study of mankind is man and we can obtain no true idea of the animal if we view him only in holiday attire. As despite all progress of science incubators and other labor-saving machinery, people still persist in entering the world in a primogenial way. The relation of the sexes is of quite immeasurable importance and knowledge thereof should not be monopolized by the narrow circle who read medical magazines. It is well that we come occasionally out of the cloud realm of sentiment and discuss the relations of man and woman from the standpoint of practical common sense. I am aware that the views expressed by Dr. Maxwell are entertained by some very able medical men, but they violate the public understanding and, as usual, the people are right and the specialists are wrong. We do not find desire, as here understood, in plants and the lowest development of animal life, it being particularly an attribute of the higher biogeny. As the more perfect the animal organism, the more acute the sensations of pleasure and pain, it follows that in man most complex of earthly creatures is found the most powerful procreative passion. But while this is the necessary co-relative of his superior nervo-muscular organization, his better attributes are likewise developed or differentiated by the same law of evolution. Desire, though accentuated, is refined and rendered subordinate to his reason, while the brute is the blind slave of instinct. With the desire of the man and the reason of the mollusk, the genus Homo would be all that he is painted by Dr. Maxwell. Should man become, for one day, more bestial than the brute, his boasted civilization would revert to subter savagery. Under such conditions, human progress, society itself, were impossible. It is by no means true, as Dr. Maxwell asserts, that children are born solely because men are animals possessing animalistic instincts. True, they could not well be born were men not animals, but the sweet reasonableness of things enters ever more and more into the advent of children upon this earth. Were man made altogether of mud, intent only on the indulgence of brute desire, there had been no sacred institution of marriage and family names proudly handed down from sire to son through many centuries. The name of father had not been venerable, nor that of mother a synonym of sanctity. To the civilized man, marriage does not mean, as Dr. Maxwell seems to imagine, simply license for obscene riot, but a solemn covenant that he and the object of his adoration have forsaken all else to cleave each unto the other through will and through woe, through life unto death. Desire may be the basic principle of the union, but only as the earth is the basic principle of the rose's beauty and the jasmine's perfume. Since earliest biblical days women have sought to bear children that their husbands might love them better, indicating that indulgence is not man's soul concern, even though he be a barbarian. That one reason he seeks the opposite sex is his desire for fair daughters and brave sons, a love in which there is no taint of lust. Hugo, to whom the human heart was as a printed page, has given us an admirable portrait of the way of a man with a maid in the courtship of Marius and Cosette. Youth and ardor and opportunity, yet no thought of evil, all the dross in human nature transformed into the spiritual by the pure white light of love. True, all men are not Marius's or Romeo's, there be lovelaces and cagliostros and calabans, but pretty good sir, let us judge our kind by the nobler instead of the baser standards. Joseph's and St. Anthony's are not plentiful I grant you, but neither are such brutish husbands as those you denounce. Love and poetry and chivalry still have an abiding place in the heart of men and the mother and matriarch of this triune is woman. Professor Carpenter, Dr. Maxwell and the female lecturer of distinction to the contrary notwithstanding, it is doubtful if the sexes differ much in the intensity of desire. True, I have written somewhere that God made the male to seek, the female to be sought, but it does not follow therefore that every woman is a Daphne who would be transformed into a laurel tree to escape an importunate lover. There may have been women so bloodless that their love left frost on the window panes of their boudoirs, but never did their sons become world compelers. Despite the pretty theory of Dr. Maxwell, the same fiery cross is laid upon the daughters as upon the sons of men and thousands falter and fall beneath it and are swept downwards to their doom.  It is because we realize that in the veins of the vessel virgin runs the same fierce tide which Egypt's queen nor Russia's empress could control and which flamed in battle splendor in the Ten Years War of Troy that with uncovered heads we render her the tribute of our respect. Women admit all this in demanding the single standard of morals. It is doubtless true that many women are less amorous than their lords are to some extent the victims of the latter, but before assuming that this defect is congenital it were well to inquire if there be not an efficient post-natal cause. It is no compliment to women to urge that she contributes unwillingly to the world would feign ignore the God-given law to be fruitful and multiply. Regardless of the affected horror of anemic prudes and ancient wallflowers the woman of today insist upon being recognized as a vital force is even beginning to comprehend that refine it as you will differentiate it as you may it is the same vital force which fills the cradle that sways the scepter. As she aspires to share with man the regency of this world she will scarce thank Carpenter and Maxwell for a premise from which the conclusion must be inevitably drawn that as a world power she must ever rank with eunuchs that she is here solely by man's volition and despite her implied protest. We must understand woman before presuming to measure her passions or estimate her powers and it is well to remember that after some 60 centuries of interested scrutiny she remains very much a mystery to eminent physicians as well as others her mind seems to be willed the psychologist no less than her body puzzles the physiologist both find the factual impossible and the self-evident absurd. Dr. Maxwell has discovered however that comparatively few women marry men whom they would select where they free to inspect the entire human penfold and make a choice of a mate now if he will conjoin that fact to this other equally self-evident that with the average woman desire is the fruitage of which love is the flower for chance he will find a valid explanation of what carpenter calls her sexual passivity. Man is a born polygamist but woman is not naturally polyandrous this statement which I have made hitherto to the consternation of the godly and at imminent danger of being prosecuted for heresy is substantiated by the fact that with man desire usually precedes love while the latter is not its necessary sequence but with the normal woman love must act as pilot for passion so much is she our moral superior every woman is a daydreamer and a worshipper during childhood she pictures to herself some perfect man some impossible demigod who is to drift within the little circle of her life and make her the proudest of women the happiest of wives in grace or beauty in genius or bravery or all these attributes he is to be the paragon to tower like Saul above his brethren her husband is to be a man of whom she will be intensely proud herself the envy of her sex if this be not correct let some old mother in Israel answer happy for the daydreamer if her fairy prince or somewhat her fond imaginings can accept as such lays heart and fortune at her feet sorrowful indeed if he come not worse if he materialize and have eyes only for others if she be so fortunate as to wed the one man in all the world whom she would have chosen had such choice been vouchsaved to her by kind heaven her loving love will sweep her through all the heavens a sensuous fancy ever feigned but the chances are that her idol lives only in the ghostly realm of dreams else goes elsewhere to wife and she marries not whom she would but whom she must wedlock thanks to her mistaken training being the end and aim of her existence instead of an idol to adore she secures some foolish idol on whom she can scarce respect and through days of disgust and nights of agony strives to do her duty to conceal from the world her disappointment thus is blood that might have been a Sirocco to stir the soul of an anchorite transformed into an icy mist the pathian venus lies crushed degraded cold amid the reeds of pen but this mess alliance this mating with Davos the detested instead of with Oedipus the adored is not the only cause of indifference the health of American wives their molliberty or womanly power is sapped in various ways millions of them are overworked all the virility ground out of them in the brutal treadmill of existence and it not infrequently happens that they are the wives of men in easy circumstances who are too fat headed to realize that those womanly attributes which so charm the sterner sex cannot long withstand continual drudgery one is tempted to believe that such men married to save the expense of hiring a housekeeper that they hoped by sleeping with their laundress to avoid wash bills take the great middle class of America which is the social and moral cream of the country and you will find that as a rule the men have abundant leisure in which to recuperate from the exhaustion of labor and are robust as Job's Phoenician bull while their wives slave from early morn till dewey eve and present the faded washed out appearance that bespeaks the work which is never done and the worry which ends only with death if you will look closely you will detect traces of tight corsets and other sartorial enginery with which dame fashion attempts to eliminate the little life which continual cooking washing and pot walloping has left for women though her heart be broken her spirit crushed and her viscera a chaos still clings to her vanity will follow the fashions though they lead to a funeral such is your idelian aphrodite ten years after marriage when to her matured charms the beauty of her girlhood should be as moonlight unto sunlight and as water unto wine and this one suffering creature with a drug shop on her pantry shelves and more female complaints than were known to the father of medicine is expected to comfort the couch of Caesar nor is this all as the struggle for existence grows harder as it has been doing in America for some decades and the necessity for keeping up appearances more imperative ever greater precautions are taken to prevent family increase so widespread is this evil that you can scarce pick up a paper without finding some abortion nostrum advertised scan the next paper that comes into your home and see if the virtues of some tansy, penny-royal or other feticidal compound be not therein set forth were these crime promoters not extensively sold the murderous scoundrels who manufacture them could not annually expend vast sums of money without public educators for their exploitation these advertisements frequently suggest the crime that is their intent hence publishers who insert them are the co-partners of abortionists and share both the inequity and the cash but even this costly advertising does not indicate the extent of the evil for by far the greater part of those married women who desire to avoid maternity are their own practitioners paying the penalty with premature age impotency and pain as a rule the mother of a large family is a healthy woman with vigor unimpaired while others of her age having few children or none are the semi-invalids who denounce their husbands to the doctor the practice of avoiding marital responsibility is frequently condemned by the medical press even by the pulpit but while MDs and DDs make a specialty of both gynecology and gyneology neither seem to understand the spirit in which these sins against hygienics are committed doubtless a few fashionable butterflies avoid motherhood for selfish reasons but these are unimportant exceptions to the rule if a woman does not love her husband she may not care to bear him children but maternal instinct usually dominates this desire if she does love him and his financial resources be limited she hesitates to increase his responsibilities the social standing of a family in this artificial age is measured chiefly by the faithfulness with which it follows fashion's decrees and as every child by enhancing expense makes service of this modern molok more difficult the unborn innocence are slain she considers the educational and other advantages that will accrue to the children already born and unselfishly, if sinfully, sacrifices herself it is an evil that will scarce be eliminated by the de-hortations of homilice who see no deeper than the surface Dr. Maxwell and his lady lecturer are certainly mistaken in the assumption that American husbands do not consider the welfare of their wives when in a delicate condition and it is a mistake that must be classed either as criminal negligence or calamity I opine that the lady lecturer aforesaid is a sour old maid that if she ever becomes a wife and mother she will learn somewhat of the caprices of her sex subsequent to conception that will materially modify her complaint reasoning by analogy from the inferior order of animals to men has led more than one enthusiastic physiologist into serious error the medical profession is continually alarming the country it has been but a little while since men were assured that they were poisoning their babies by kissing them and now they are flatly told that their wives regard the nuptial couch with a version Havana cigars give a fellow the tobacco heart plug exhausts the saliva necessary to digestion and bourbon whiskey burns his stomach full of blow holes beer makes him bilious tea and coffee knock out his nerves while plum pudding gives him dyspepsia grape pie appendicitis and hot biscuits undermine his general health emotional preaching afflicts him with jerks golf has a tendency to paresis the round dance infects him with phylogeny and bicycling deforms his face we might just as well be dead and with Lucifer as believe these doctors for life wouldn't be half worth the living if we heeded their laws my brethren of the loaded capsule and sociable stethoscope are evidently off their equipoise babies flourish much better on the kiss micrococcus than on the slipper bacillus few women will live with impotent husbands and nearly every centenarian is a collocation of bad habits that by all the laws of Hippocrates should have buried him at the halfway house it may seem unshivalrous to say so but it is a stubborn fact nevertheless and merits the consideration of Dr. Maxwell that more men are misled by lustful women than maids betrayed by designing men in fact no man at least no civilized man makes him proper advances to a woman unless he receives some encouragement being deterred both by chivalrous sentiment and respect for the persuasive shotgun despite the picture drawn by the lady lecturer and others of the horrors of married life I opine that the woman who captures a sure enough man who isn't negotiating simply for a cook and chambermaid and who can be depended upon to play Romeo to her Juliet for sixty years or so should be in no unseemly haste to break into that heaven where Hyman is given the marvel heart and the matron who breaks into the game with seven obedient husbands to her credit has no advantage over the old maid who never swallowed a pillow while watching a man clad only in a single garment and a cerulean halo of profanity making frantic swipes under the bureau for a missing collar button End of Chapter 21 Are Women Devoid of Desire? All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Brian Keenan Chapter 22 Hypnotic Power of Her I've received a letter from Tyler, Texas propounding the following fateful conundrum Can Woman Hypnotize Man? My correspondent adds that by answering the iconoclast will confer a favor on the people of Tyler decide a bet and settle a vexatious question The affirmative scoops the stakes wins dead easy and world without end The man who puts his doubloons on the negative either never saw a woman until after she was dead or didn't know what ailed him when under her hypnotic influence Perhaps he imagined that he had a chronic case of yellow jaundice was threatened with peresis or had been inadvertently struck by lightning Perhaps he's under the mystic spell of some wily Vivienne even now and laying foolish wagers in his mesmeric sleep Can Woman Hypnotize Man? Well, I should snigger She could hypnotize anything that wears pants from the prince at his gilded poker game to the peasant scattering worm poison in the lowly cotton patch and revolving in his think tank the tenets of populism And I'm not sure but the clothing store dummies Brother dudes are simply the physical wrecks and mental ruins of her hypnotic medicine She hypnotizes because she can't help it She's built that way The Tyler savants are way behind the times They are plunging into the shoreless realm of psychology in search of information that was trite in antediluvian times They are trying to determine whether man is a free moral agent in matters matrimonial When the sire of Solomon had made answer and Lillian Russell's multitudinous husbands settled the vexatious question forever and for I But perhaps Tyler has been too busy raising politicians to keep pace with the psychological procession Eve hypnotized Adam and made him cast away the empire of the earth for a scrubby apple and ever since her fair daughters have been making men imitate their remote forefathers folly She does not operate as do the professional he hypnotists Instead of giving you a bright button or a brand new dime to look at She puts her dimples in evidence Milestrums of love in a sea of beauty She dazzles you for a moment with the dreamy splendor of her eyes Then studies the toe of a boot that would raise the Kansas corn crop for trilby or supply Cinderella with bunions She looks down to blush and she looks up to sigh Catches you a coming and going and you're gone You realize that the linchpin is slipping out of your logic but you let her slip You suspect that your judgment has taken unto itself wings that you couldn't tell whether you're a red-lick or democrat or a hard-sider prohibitionist but you don't care You simply bid farewell to every fear and give the operator your undivided attention She plays with a skilled hand on all your senses until the last one of them passes in music out of sight and leaves you a mental bankrupt She makes you drunken with the music of her voice and maddens you with the low sweet melody of her skirts She permits you quite accidentally, of course to catch a glimpse of an ankle turned for an angel and as she bends forward to chastise you with her fan your vagrant gaze rests for a fleeting moment on alabaster hemispheres rising in a billowy sea of lace like Aphrodite cradled in old oceans foam You are now far advanced in the hypnotic trance and very fond of it as far as you've got Her every posture is a living picture Her slightest movement a sensuous symphony Her breath upon your cheek a perfumed air to wop you to the dreamy but dangerous land of the lotus eaters You drift nearer and ever nearer like a moth revolving in narrowing circles around an incandescent light until you find yourself alone with her in some cozy nook the world forgetting if not by your creditors forgot Being naturally industrious you seek employment and she gives you her hand to hold Of course she could hold it herself but the occupation pleases you and she doesn't mind Besides you make more rapid progress into the realm of irresponsibility by taking care of it for her occasionally You conceive that what is worth doing at all is worth doing well and frees to that little fragment of pulsing snow like a farmer to his water-berry in a camp-meeting crowd She rewards your devotion to duty by a gentle pressure and a magnetic thrill starts at your fingertips and goes through your system like an apple-jack-totty until it makes your toes tingle then starts on its return trip delivering volume as it travels until it becomes a tidal wave that envelops all your world You are now uncertain whether you have hit the lottery for the capital prize or been nominated for justice of the peace You have lost your identity and should you chance to meet yourself in the middle of the road would need an introduction The larger the supply of brains you sat into the game with the less you have left You begin to talk incoherently and lay the premise for a breach of promise case You sip the handmade nectar from the rosy slot in her face Harrow the Parisian peach bloom on her cheek with your scrubbing brush mustache Reduce the circumference of her health corset with your manly arm and your hypnotism is complete Right there the last faint ad-embration of responsibility ends and complete mental aberration begins You sigh like a furnace and write sonnets to your mistress's eyebrow You cut fantastic capers before high heaven for the divertissement of those who don't yet know how it is themselves The operator may break the spell by marrying you in which case you will return by easy stages to the normal and again become a sane man and useful member of society But if she lets you down with the sister racket your nervous system is pretty apt to sour When a woman loses her hypnotic power she either straddles a bike becomes a religious crank or seeks surcease for her sorrow among the female suffragists End of Chapter 22 Hypnotic Power of Her Recording by Brian Keenan For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org This recording is by Michelle Frye Pettenridge, Louisiana Chapter 23 Victor Hugo's Immortality Quoting the St. Louis Mirror Philadelphia's school board has barred Victor Hugo's Les Miserables from the list of books to be used in the high school in the teaching of French as a book not fit for girls What would not one give for a diagram of the heads of these educators? It must be a nasty mind which can find anything immoral in that book as a whole One may take a chapter out here and there and show it to be broad and coarse divorced from the context but the whole effect of the book is moral The mind of the man who can say that Les Miserables will not tend as a whole to make a girl more womanly a boy more manly must be poisoned by the miasma from a filthy heart What and who in it are immoral? Not Valjean not Fontaine even nor Cossette not Marius not Javert the detective Is the chapter on Chambron's surrender the offending fragment of the great literary masterpiece? That chapter is the sublimity of disgust There never was anyone hurt spiritually or morally by the great French masterpiece of fiction The man who can say the book is defiling would draw defilement from the fount of Castali The Philadelphia school board has declared itself an aggregation of asses Les Miserables is the greatest poem of divine humanity that this world has known since Shakespeare wrote Lear But I suppose Lear 2 is immoral I suppose everything is immoral From Oedipus the tyrant to Hall Cain's Christian that teaches that men are born of women and that love will have its way even unto all bitterness It is eminently fitting that Lear Miserables should be condemned as immoral in the most immoral city in the United States A Philadelphian may be depended upon to see immorality in one of Raphael's Madonna's End quote My esteemed contemporary should bottle up its indignation There is absolutely nothing to be gained by lambasting idiots by criticizing Cretans Editor Reedy is but casting his pearls before swine is talking to people who, having eyes, see not having ears, hear not and whose cerebra are filled with sawdust They are likened to a lot of sheep that follow the master ram not because they comprehend or care whether he is going but because they smell him and point their pro-Biscotti in his direction as naturally as the needle lines the pole It was Jean-Paul, was it not, who discovered that if a cane can be held horizontally before the lead ram of a flock compelling him to saltate, then removed the thousandth you lamb will jump at that point just as did the pioneer So it is with a peatistical and puritistical people they will follow some stupid old bell-weather because utterly incapable of independent thought of individual ratiosination When Lady Miserable first appeared some literary Columbus made the remarkable discovery that it was a French book that it was shot full of slang the expressive patois of the race that it was liberally spiced with Argo the vernacular of vagabonds Hugo's immortal masterpiece has not yet recovered from this discovery The thousandth you lamb is still blithely saltating over the black thorn It is as useless to contend against the purest fad as against the holiness fake Let the plague of army worms or epidemic or epizootic, it must run its course Preternicity of expression and affectation of euphemism has in every age and climb evidenced moral degeneration and mental decay When people emasculate their minds they redouble their corporeal devotion at the shrine of Priapus for nature preserves the equipoise Every writer of virility is now voted obscene Every man who strikes sledgehammer blows at brutal wrong entrenched in the prescriptive right is denounced as immoral Let Miserable not fit for young ladies' reading and this the epica of the new woman of the single standard of mind and morals While woman is insisting that she is every way man's equal entitled to share with him the wardship of this world Detroit is putting bloomers on the statues of Diane Boston refusing the beckond Waco draping the marble figure of a child exhibited at her cotton palace Anthony Comstock having cataleptic convulsions Let Miserable excluded from Philadelphia high schools and the iconoclast denounced by certain whiskered old he-virgins as obscene And so it goes This world is becoming so awfully nice that it's infernally nasty It sees evil in everything because its point of view is that of the pimp its mind is a foul sewer whose exhalations coat even the rose of Sharon with slime A writer may no longer call a spade a spade he must continuously refer to it as an agricultural implement lest he shock the super-sensitiveness of hedonists and call down upon his head the anathema maranatha of men infinitely worse than Oscar Wilde What the mirror means by Cambrone's surrender I cannot imagine unless editor Reedy was indulging in grim irony I present extracts from the account of Cambrone which he suspects may have given the pietistical Quakers a pain It is the finale of Hugo's matchless word painting of the Battle of Waterloo Quote A few squares of the guard standing motionless in the swash of the route like rocks in running water held out till night They awaited the double shadow of night and death and let them surround them Each regiment isolated from the others and no longer connected with the army which was broken on all sides died where it stood The gloomy squares, deserted, conquered and terrible struggled formatively with death for Hume, Wagram, Jenna and Friedlund were dying in it When twilight set in at nine in the evening one square still remained at the foot of the plateau of Mont Saint-Jean In this mournful valley at the foot of the slope scaled by the queer officers now inundated by the English masses Beneath the converging fire of the hostile and victorious artillery under the fearful hail storm of projectiles this square still resisted It was commanded by an obscure officer by the name of Cambrone At each valley the square still diminished but continued to reply to the canister with musketary fire and each moment contracted its four walls Pugetives in the distance stopping at moments to draw breath in the darkness to this gloomy diminishing thunder when this legion had become only a handful when their colors were but a rag when their ammunition was exhausted and muskets were clubbed and when the pile of corpses was greater than the living group the victors fell a species of sacred awe and the English artillery ceased firing It was a sort of respite these combatants had around them an army of specters and lines of mounted men the black profile of guns and the white sky visible through the wheels The colossal death's head which heroes ever glimpsed in the smoke of battle advanced and looked at them They could hear in the twilight gloom that the guns were being loaded the lighted matches resembling the eyes of a tiger in the night formed a circle around their heads The lin stocks of the English batteries approached the guns at this moment an English general Coalville according to some Madeleine according to others Holding the supreme moments suspended over the heads of these men shouted to them Brave Frenchmen surrender Cambrone answered Merde To Cambrone's exclamation an English voice replied Fire the batteries flashed the hillside trembled from all these throats of brass derruption of grape a vast cloud of smoke vaguely whitened by the rising moon rolled up and when the smoke had been dissipated there was nothing The dreaded remnant was annihilated the guard was dead The four walls of the living redoubt lay low with here and there a scarcely perceptible quiver among the corpses Thus the French legions grander than those of Rome expired on Mont Saint-Jean on the earth saddened with rain and blood end quote Hugo quite needlessly apologized for quoting the Frenchman's laconic reply to the summons to surrender he was writing history and no milk and water euphemism could have expressed Cambrone's defiance and contempt Of course John Bull pitilessly shot to death that heroic fragment of the old guard which forgot in its supreme hour while foolhardiness may be magnificent it is not war I would have put a cordon of soldiers about that pathetic remnant of Napoleon's greatness and held it there to this good day rather than have plowed it down as a farmer plows jimson weeds into a pile of compost but John Bull is not built that way is impregnated with the chivalry of Baylor Cambrone's reply is the only objectionable word in the entire work and certain it might be pardoned in a scrap of history by people whose press and a pulpit have hypothesized a trilby de Mariette's supposititious prostitute I presume that the Philadelphia school board is about on an intellectual and moral parity with the trustees of Baylor haven't the remotest idea whether married means maggots or moonshine Victor Hugo was a lord in the aristocracy of intellect his masterpiece is Nature's Faithful Mirror Ame de Boos should be branded with a hot iron on the hickory nut head of every creature whom its perusal does not benefit His description of the battle of Waterloo is to Ben Hurr's chariot race what Mount Etna in eruption is to a glow worm It transcends the loftiest flights of Shakespeare before it even the wondrous tales of Troy pales in ineffectual fires It casts the shadow of its genius upon Bulwer's Pompey as the wing of the condor shades the crow Byron's sound of revelry by night is the throbbing of a snare drum drowned in Hugo's Thunders of Moussaint Jean Denton's rage sinks to an inaudible whisper and even Escalus shivers before that cataclysm of Promethean fire that's celestial monsoon It stirs the heart like the rustle of a silken gonfalon dipped in gore like the whistle of rifle balls like the rhythmic dissonance of a battery slinging shrapnel from the heights of Gettysburg into the ragged legions of General Lee I have cancelled my contemporary to be calm but by heaven it does stir my soul into mutiny to see a lot of intellectual pismires who have secured positions of trust because of their political pull in the tenderloin hurling their petty scorn at Victor Hugo It would like Carlisle's Critic Fly complacently rubbing its hinder legs and giving its opinion of the Parthenon like Esop's vindictive snail resliming the masterpiece of Phidias like a Baylor professor lecturing on the poetry of Lord Byron Every writer of eminence since the days of Moses had to run the gauntlet of these slight people's impotent wrath While slandering the prophets of progress and religion they have vented their foul room on all the gods of literature Kansas, I am told put a man in the penitentiary for sending through the mail's biblical texts printed on postal cards Speaking of Goethe's William Meister Carlisle says Meister, it appears is a vulgar work Oh, gentlemen, we here in certain circles could have written it Few real gentlemen, it is insinuated can like to read it No real lady, unless possessed of considerable courage, should profess to have read it at all End quote And yet, Wilheim Meister changed the whole current of European literature The work was practically committed to memory by the noblest men and women of the world We hear the venerated queen repeating from it in her cruel exile Let the Philadelphia school board and the valorian managers construe it if they can What, I guess, knit The idea of keeping Les Miserables away from the ladies just as though they could be found in the whole country, a 16-year-old maid with any pretensions to intelligence who hasn't wept over a little corset, been in love with Angel Ross and doted on Guevrache and Jean Vergent So, ultra nice has the world become that we must skip the canticles Shakespeare's plays must now be Clapper Claude to make them palatable Alexander Pope's philosophic rhyme must be deleted with dashes Walt Whitman's poetry is too strong for the average stomach But we continue to fire into the bosoms of our families the daily press with its specialization of Hogan's Alley and the Yellow Kid, reeking with its burden of ads of abortion recipes and syphilitic nostrums even take our wives and daughters to the tabernacle to be told by Sam Jones that if they don't think he has backbone he'll pull up his shirt tail and show him Byron was vigorously denounced by the vindictive Miss Nancy's of his day but scornfully replied I have not loved the world nor the world me. I have not flattered its rank breath nor bound to its idolatries a patient knee There seems to be nothing left that we may safely read except Watt's hymns, Talmage's sermons and the pathetic story of Mary's little lamb, a promising diet truly upon which to rear intellectual titans The remarkable thing about this purest fad is that all the pods snaps wear a pants, the ladies are not on tent to hooks all the time, lest something be said or written that will bring a blush to the cheek of a young person It is the hee-virgins the bearded women who are ever on the watch, lest young femininity become impregnated with an idea This country's got a bad case of malice poudre and needs an heroic dose of double action liver pills End of Chapter 23 Victor Hugo's Immortality Chapter 24 of the complete works of brand the iconoclast Chapter 21 by William Cowper Brand This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org This recording is by William Jones Chapter 24 The Science of Kissing I note that a Britisher named Professor Bridger has been infringing on my copyright timing as an original discovery that kissing is an excellent tonic and will cure dyspepsia. When the or busy bacteriologists first announced that osculation was a dangerous pastime that divers and sundry varieties of bacteria hopped blithely back and forth engendering disease and death I undertook a series of experiments solely in the interest of science being a Baptist preacher and making camp meetings my specialty I had unusual opportunity for investigation for those of our faith are strict constructionists of the Biblical law to greet one another with a kiss. I succeeded in demonstrating before the end of the tending season that osculation, when practiced with reasonable discretion and unfaltering industry, is an infallible antidote for at least half the ills that human flesh is heir to. The reason the doctors arrived at different conclusions is that they kissed indiscriminately and reasoned inductively. They found on casting up the account that bad breath and face powder, the sour milk model of youth and the chilling frost of age comprised six sevenths of the sum total. Under such conditions there was nothing to do but establish a quarantine. I pointed out as Professor Bridger has since done that a health microbe as well as a disease basillus nitificates on the osculatory apparatus and added that failure to absorb a sufficient quality of these hydrologic germs into the system causes old maize to look jaundiced and bachelors to die sooner than Benedict's. Kisses, when selected with new care and taken on the installment plan will not only restore a misplaced appetite that are especially beneficial in cases of hay fever as they banish that tired feeling tone up the liver, invigorate the heart and make the blood to sing through the system like a giant juice harp. I found by patient experiment that the health microbe becomes active at 15 reaches maturity at 20 begins to lose his vigor at 40 and is quite useless as a tonic when as someone has tersely expressed it a woman's kisses begin to taste of her teeth thin bluish lips produce very few health germs and those scarce worth of harvesting but a full red mouth with Cuban curves at the corners will yield enormously if the crop be properly cultivated. I did not discover whether the blonde or brunette variety is entitled to presidents in medical science but incline to the opinion that a judicious admixture is most advisable from a therapeutical standpoint.   I pretty avoid it. When a girl runs from a kiss you may take it for granted either that the germ crop is not ripe or you are poaching on somebody else's preserves. The best results can be obtained about the midnight hour when the dew is on the rose the jasmine bud drunken with its own perfume and the mockbird trilling a last good night to his drowsy mate. You entice your best girl into the garden to watch Venus's flaming orb hanging like the coin orb pendant from the crescent moon you pause beneath the great gnarled live oak as myriad leaves rustling softly as the wings of serifs don't be in a hurry and for God's sake don't gab in such a night silence is the acme of eloquence in such a night Troilus mounted the trojan walls inside his soul toward the Grecian tents where Cressid lay. She watches the fireflies respiring in phosphorescent flame amid the clover blooms while you watch her entwine a spray of honeysuckle in her hair. You clumsy fingers unloose and her fragrant dresses caught up by the cool night wind float about your face. Somehow her hand gets tangled up with yours and after a spasmodic flutter there remains a willing prisoner. The fireflies have failed to interest her and she is studying the stars.  Be patient. If you want you to kiss her she'll find means to make it manifest and a maid worth kissing despises a forward man. She looks very beautiful with her face upturned in the moonlight but don't say a word about it for there's a little of the poseur about all the daughters of Eve.  They roam idly over the shadowy garden then close as beneath a weight of weariness. Her head rests more heavily against your shoulder and her bosom trembles with a half audible sigh. There is now really no occasion for further delay.  Their pause for the essence of enjoyment is in anticipation. The man who gulps down a glass of old wine without first inhaling its onanthic and feasting his eyes upon his ruddy splinters is simply a sight. Wait until you have noted the dark lashes lying upon the cheek of sun flushed snow. The charm of married brows the throat of alabaster the temple in her chin the wine-tent of her half-parted lips with her glint of pearl. Wait until her eyes half open look inquiringly into yours and close again. Then, sink your head gently but firmly with one arm support her chin with the other hand and give the health germs ample time to change their home. A kiss to have any scientific value should last one minute and seven seconds by Shrewsbury clock and be repeated seven times not in swift succession but with the usual interval between wine at a symposiac. Byron did these things differently but the author of Don Juan is not a safe example for young folks to follow.  That may be imminently satisfactory to Mars but scarce proper for Venus it is exciting but not scientific. It suggests charity children gorging themselves with plum pudding rather than pooling natures drunken with beauty and fragrance swooning beneath the sweetness of a duet sung by their own chaste souls. The dyspepsic who cannot recover by following my prescription deserves to die. The pessimist who it doesn't make a look at life through rose tending classes should be excluded from human society and the hypochondriac who it doesn't help ought to be remained. There is not a human ill unless it be hypocrisy for which nature does not provide a remedy and I recommend the health germ which builds its nest on lovely women's lips as worth more than the whole materia medica. I don't know whether it will raise the dead but I've always doubted the story that Egypt kissed the cold lips of her Roman Anthony. It would have brought me back to life in love had I been dead a month.  It is but a slight improvement on the civilization of Ashanti where a man proposes marriage by knocking his dulciana down with a club and dragging her through the backwoods pasture by the hair of her head but kisses properly taken beneath the stars and among the roses are the perennial fount of youth for which Ponce de Leon sailed far seas in a vain search for the blessed bimini. End of Chapter 24 THE SCIENCE OF KISSING One of the cardinal faults of the American character is a propensity to brag. Brother Jonathan's egotism long since passed into a proverb in no section of this land of the alleged free and home of the ism does the blow-hard blow longer and louder than in the south. We are the people, the non-peril. There are none like us beneath the sun. From the Empyrean we look down upon common humanity talk turgid and swell up with the vanglory of a young turkey-cock with his first tail feathers. It were well for us to seize our foolish boasting and con well the stern lessons taught at the cannon's mouth. The first and greatest of these is that only by honest labor by earnest endeavor can a people become truly great. The war swept away the curse that was our weakness, negro-slavery. It broke in upon our old exclusiveness. Shattered the foolish cast that held us in a iron battle, made labor respectable and progress possible. It brought energetic northern people among us to teach us that the way to greatness lies through the workshop to incite us to shake off our indolence and enter the race for preferment. Grants red-throated batteries did more than break the shackles from the wrists of the blacks. They tore the cursed fetters of caste and custom from the whites, a nobler emancipation. They set the heart of southern chivalry to beating with a truer, a stronger life. In the mad tempest of battle the new south was born. The crash of arms was the groans of maternity, the deluge of blood her baptismal rite. From the ashes of desolate homes and ruined cities she sprang phoenix-like, and is now mounting the imperian with strong and steady wing. The emancipation proclamation was a bow of promise that never again, while the world stands and the heathens endure will north and south meet in battle-shock. That the greatness of the one shall become the proud heritage of the other. That the grandest section of the American Union shall yet, with God's blessing, produce the greatest people that ever adorn with. The war is long passed, we fought and lost. Our triumphant foe extended to us a brother's hand, accorded us the honor due a brave and spirited people. That we should suffer reconstruction pains was to have been expected. That they were unnecessarily severe was due chiefly to the greed of a click of politicians partly also to the fact that north misunderstood us in black wards, even as we persist in misunderstanding the Yankee. But no gibbet rose in that storm-swept waste. Our very leaders now occupy positions of honor and trust under the flag they defied. Let us not requite the generosity of our erstwhile foes by an attempt to tarnish their well-earned laurels. Rather, let us praise and emulate them, strive with them in a nobler field out of war. When the north and south blend in one homogenous people, as blend they must, when the blood of the stern puritan mingles with that of the dashing cavalier, then indeed will be a nation and a people at which the world will stand aghaze. For northern vigor wedded to the southern blood will strike within the pulses like a god's to push us forward through the life of shocks, dangers and deeds, until endurance grows sinnued with action and the full-grown will, circled through all experience, pure law can measure perfect freedom. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This recording is by Michelle Fry, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Chapter 26 Dogmatism, the mother of doubt. A worship for the world. Church unification has long been the dream of many earnest souls who regret to see the various denominations wasting energy warring upon each other that should be brought to bear on the legions of Lucifer. But even the most sanguine must admit that there is little prospect of their dreams becoming more tangible, at least for some ages yet. The bloody chasm which Luther and his co-laborers opened will not be bridged during the lifetime of the present and wisdom is not competent to formulate a creed to devise a doctrine upon which the Protestant world will consent to unite. The present tendency is not toward church unification but greater and more sharply defined division. Instead of dogmatic controversy dying away, it is becoming more general. Heterodoxy is being hunted with a keener zest than for years and doctrinal disputation has become well nigh as virulent as the polemics of partisan politics. In the meantime a majority of mankind in highly civilized countries remain away from the church take no thought of the future or seek truth in science rather than revelation. Dogmatism is the fruitful mother of doubt. By assuming to know too much of God's great plan, by demanding too abject obedience to his fiats by attempting to stifle honest inquiry and seal the lips of living scholars with the dicta of dead scholastics by standing ever ready to brand as blasphemers all who presume to question are there to differ the church has driven millions of God fearing men into passive indifference or overt opposition and the number is rapidly increasing. The church does not realize how stupendous this army really is not every man who regards the church as but a pretender proclaims that fact on the housetops it is not good policy and policy is the distinguishing characteristic of this day and age. Church people are very sensitive to criticism of their creed perhaps the mother of a malformed or vicious child could tell why and most men have loved ones or patrons who are trying to find a little comfort among the husks of an iron bound orthodoxy. If any devout dogmatizer really desires to learn how general is this attitude of non-receptivity of the orthodox religion let him assume the role of a scuffer then he will hear the truth from men's lips for while the doubter may yield passive ascent to the prevalent orthodoxy the earnest believer is not apt to enact the role of Peter without compulsion instead of conquering the world the church is rapidly losing what it has hitherto gained true it still retains a semblance of vigor and prosperity but like many a great political structure its brilliancy is born of decay it is no longer the dominating factor in social life the heart and soul of civilization but an annex increasing in magnificence as wealth increases and mankind can afford to expend more for ostentation and fashionable diversion it is noticeable that the less attention the minister pays to creeds the less dogmatism he indulges in the more popular he becomes with the people the more eagerly they flock to hear him the world does not care to listen to prosy lectures on foreordination and the terrors of the Tartarus because its reason rejects such cruel creeds it takes little interest in the question whether Christ was dipped or sprinkled by the gentleman in the camel's hair cut away because it cannot for the life of it see that it makes any difference it does not want to be worried with Jejeune's speculations an end to the trinity because it considers one god quite sufficient if it can but find him does not want to hear much about the miracles because it considers it a matter of absolute indifference whether they are true or not but just the same the great world is heart hungry for real knowledge of the all father eager to embrace any faith that does no violence to its reason to grasp at any tangible thread of hope of a happy life with loved ones beyond the tombs dark portals Professor James T. Bixby in a powerful plea for truth seekers quoted approvingly the words of an eminent ecclesiastic of the church of England who characterized the present age as preeminently the age of doubt another writer says that Europe is turning in despair toward nirvana the almost unprecedented success of Hartman's philosophy of the unconscious which is little more or less than buddhism gives a strong color of truth to the startling assertion while Europe is sending missionaries to the Ganges India is planting the black pessimism of Gautama on the Rhine and the Sain 19th centuries of dogmatizing to end in an age of doubt and a cry for the oblivion of nirvana clearly there is something wrong for doubt and a desire for annihilation is not the normal condition of the human mind a belief in God that the universe is the result of design is inherent in man it is not a belief that must be implanted and tenderly nursed it is one that manifests itself in the lowest form of savage life of which we have cognizance one that is well nigh impossible to crush out and complimenting this belief in most instances is the hope of immortality no cataclysm of crime into which man can plunge is able to eradicate his belief that he is a creature of a supernatural power and intelligence the tendency of scientific research is to strengthen it by making more manifest the wondrous works of God it is doubtful if the belief in man's divine origin was ever entirely obliterated for many human mind if there ever was or will be an atheist many men believe themselves such but if they will carefully examine their position they will usually find that they have been carried to this extreme by a powerful revulsion from incredible dogmatism and that they can only maintain it by a continual and unnatural effort by a persistent outrage upon that very intelligence of which they boast the moment they cease to act on the defensive they begin to drift back under the divine spell to pay homage conscious or unconscious to the all father those who deny the inspiration of the bible are for the most part but doubting thomas's who ask to see the nail prints of the chosen lord who are disposed to question him not because they are irreligious but because they want the truth and they know for a verity that it is the truth is it not possible to found a church in which may be gathered the millions who cannot swallow the miracles the incarnation the plenary inspiration of the bible and other non-essential husks that enshroud the christian cultists where that religion which exists conscious or unconscious in their nature may find room for expansion where honest inquiry may be prosecuted doubts freely and fairly discussed and perhaps dispelled where all truth whether found in the bible or the quran the law of manna or the zen divesta science or philosophy may be eagerly seized and carefully treasured if it were possible to thus bring together and utilize the vast amount of religious energy which lies without the pale of all present churches unrecognized by the most warred upon by the many if it were possible to gather all believers in God together where they may strengthen their faith by communion and worship extend their knowledge by research in every field, spiritual and material, secular and religious what a mighty recruit would thus be added to those powers that are working for the world's salvation let me briefly sketch such a church as I would like to be a member of such as I imagine millions of others who are not will never be members of existent communions would worship in with pleasure it's chief essential should be belief in God not the God of the Jews, Mohammedans or Christians, but the God of everything animate and inanimate in the whole broad universe the God of justice and wisdom, truth and love the God seen in the face of every noble woman and honest man heard in every truth felt in every holy aspiration everyone believing in the existence of such a God and I doubt if any do not should be eligible for membership no matter what their theories regarding his personality, plans and powers truth should be sought assiduously and welcomed never found we should not attempt to make it fit a preconceived theory but to make the theory conform to it science should be the hand made of the church philosophy its helpful brother but its ecumenical council its court of last resort should be the religious instinct inherent in man that perception so fine so subtle that all attempts to weave it into words to clothe so that the eye may perceive and the reason handle it have signally failed which logic is hammered at with all her ballast day and battering rams for 30 centuries or more in vain which above all things else binds the human race in one great brotherhood has supplied the missing links in every cult bridged its lashes, surmounted its incongruities, comprised of the expungible fortress upon which the high flood tide of worldly wisdom beats in vain its body doctrine should be love of God charity for man, truth, honor, purity and these are comprised the whole Hebrew decalogue with solans and like Kyrgys constitutions justinian's pandex the code Napoleon and all codes, catechisms divinities, moralities whatsoever that man has hitherto devised and enforced with altar fire and gallows ropes for his social guidance they embrace all that is blessed and beautiful, gracious and great in every sect, science, and philosophy known to man these are points of doctrine upon which there can be no dissension, Buddhist and Mohammedan, Jew and Gentile Catholic and Calvinist, philosopher and free thinker all approve regarding what provision the Lord will make for us hereafter the plenary are a partial inspiration of the Bible, the evidential value of the miracles, the divinity of Christ and kindred subjects every communicant may properly be left free to exercise his individual judgment to formulate a cast iron article of faith upon any or all of these questions would be to enter the realm of dogmatics to add one more voice to the ecclesiastical wrangle that is filling the earth and heaven and Hades with its unprofitable bin to found a sect instead of a world embracing church devoted to the simple worship of God and the inculcation of morals to many a religion without a future life annex may appear as unfinished as a building without a roof as ephemeral, as unstable as one put together without nails or mortar. But let's forget that future reward and punishment was no part of the early Hebrew cult that the doctrine of man's immortality is but a late and apparently a gentile graft that the Buddhist religion which has held the souls of countless millions in thrall teaches complete extinction of the ego as the greatest good. Man does not embrace religion for what there is in it does not worship because God possesses the power to reward and punish any more than he stands entranced by the glory of the sunrise because the rays of the day God will ripen his cotton and corn. He pays involuntary homage to the higher power as he does to men of genius who benefit him but indirectly to women of great beauty whom he never hopes to possess. We may safely trust our future to the same great power to whom we owe the present. It is far more important that we make the most possible of this life than that we have fixed convictions and the next. It is safe to assume that had the great God intended we should know for assurity what awaits us beyond death's dark river, he would have made it so manifest that diversity of opinion would be impossible. That he had intended we should each and all accept Christ as a divinity, he would have driven stronger pegs upon which the outing Thomases of this late day could hang their faith. That had he intended the Bible should stand for all time as his infallible word, it would not have been entrusted for so many centuries to the care of fallible men. That had he intended we should each and all believe in miracles he would have made better provision for their authentication or built our heads on a different plan. Belief in immortality is a very comforting doctrine for such as hope to dodge hell pains and is so general so prone to manifest itself where the mind of man has not been persistently trained in an opposite direction that we may almost call it a religious instinct which is but a vulgarism for a divine and direct revelation of God. Therefore it should not be discouraged in our new world church but given every opportunity for expansion. No one should be excluded however if he failed to find evidence within or without to sustain the theory. Such a church would embrace all others as the ocean stream of the ancients encompassed and fed every sea. It would be the tide that would bind all in unity. It should welcome to its pulpit all ministers of whatsoever denomination who desire to treat the worship of God from a non-sectarian standpoint or read a homily calculated fact in the morals of mankind. It's him should be songs of praise to that God which made us the greatest in his visible creation. It's prayers should be thanks for past mercies and petitions that he will make our brightest dreams of life eternal beyond the skies a blessed reality that having brought us so near his bright effulgence in create for time he will gather us to his loving bosom for all eternity. Such is the church in which I hope one day to see the whole world gathered a church whose peons of praise to the great God would drown dogmatic dialects as the swelling notes of an organ drown the fretful complaining of a child. End of Chapter 26 Dogmatism The Mother of Doubt Chapter 27 Of the Complete Works of Bran The Iconoclast Volume 1 William Calper Bran This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Rita Butros Chapter 27 An Unprofitable Controversy Mr. Gladstone and Professor Huxley have been warmly debating the story of the swine the devil and the deep sea. What an occupation for two of the master spirits of the age. Is it any wonder that young men contemplating such polemics should turn away from revealed religion altogether? Fortunately the religious world is no longer convulsed from center to circumference by such disputations. The day has gone by when the whole fabric of the Christian religion comes into its foundation by the discovery of an error in biblical chronology or the impossibility of a large whale swallowing a small profit. Gradually the worship of the creator is grounding itself on general principles and Christian apologetics is slowly but surely mounting above the particularists spreading a broader opinion leaving to the antiquary the inaccuracies and inconsistencies of tradition. All friends of the faith should hasten this movement. Really it matters not whether the Gadarenes whose swine were drowned were Jews or Gentiles whether Christ did or did not cast out devils, raised the dead or caused the blind to see. It matters not whether Joseph or the Holy Spirit was his immediate father. He was the most high God and is it not the advent of each and all as much a mystery as though we were begotten without an earthly father spoken into existence or sprang like Minerva from the brow of Jov. Why should the world stand a gaze for 19 centuries at one miracle when 60 full as great as incomprehensible are happening every minute? If God is the author of us all is it more wonderful that he should create us in one way than in another? Was it necessary that the all father should change the order of generation to prove his existence or that Christ should enter the world in an uncommon manner to establish his claim to preeminence among the sons of God? It is all together immaterial how Christ came into the world. Sufficient it is for us to know that he came and brought with him hope for sorrowing millions. That he was of God it required no preternatural birth no wondrous miracles to establish. It was not the healing he brought to the flesh but the comfort he administered to the spirit that stamped him divine. Is it possible that in this world of sorrow sin and death where millions are stretching out their hands to heaven and praying for a sign that the loved ones who have crossed the dark river are safe in the bosom of the great all father where millions more are going down to death in an agony of doubt and fear that professor Huxley and Mr. Gladstone, science and religion can find no grander work to do than dispute about the ownership of a herd of swine drowned 19 centuries ago when churchmen declined to engage in acrimonious disputation regarding non-essentials either with non-churchmen or each other when the churches no longer insist that this or that dogma must be observed or accepted as a prerequisite to salvation when they study the spirit of revelation more and the letter less when they admit that all religions that have brought comfort to humanity were divine and seek light wherever it is to be found whether in the Bible or the Vedas, ethnic philosophy or science the occupation of the pains and the Ingersolls will be forever gone and religion command the respect of all mankind in union there is strength in disunion weakness if this world is ever to be Christianized the different denominations must learn not to fight natural enemies but allies differently organized cores differently uniformed divisions of one great army instead of wasting their strength warring upon each other in repelling atheistical assaults upon outworks that are a source of weakness and should be abandoned they must swing into line shoulder to shoulder each with its own particular and present a solid front to the common enemy which is not the doubter of particular dogmas but that evil of which is born sorrow shame and death when the different divisions of the church which acknowledges Christ as its head become mutually supporting and its officers distinguish the real battle from the hasty firing of frightened pickets then and not till then will the banner of Christianity float triumphant over a world redeemed then will the fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man be known upon the earth end of Chapter 27 an unprofitable controversy Chapter 28 of the Complete Works of Brand the Iconoclast Volume 1 by William Calper Brand this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Brian Keenan Chapter 28 Garters and Amen Growns On one page of the Houston Post for Sunday December 12 I find several columns devoted to our boys and girls on the next the following advertisement prominently displayed by a Houston haberdasher our ladies garter department we can give you an all silk garter for fifty cents with nice buckles with such reading on them as private grounds stop mama is coming look quick good night call again I am a warm baby take off your things etc the paper contains the usual Sunday morning quota of church notices religious news and editorial moralizing constituting a delectable a la prodrida calculated to turn the stomach of a self-respecting yaller dog doubtless many purveyors of garters keep in stock those peculiarly adapted to the trade of the tenderloin but this is the first time that I have seen such truck advertised in any paper permitted to pass through the males or enter the homes of respectable people imagine a Houston person rising from family prayers on Sunday morning and placing in the hands of his young daughter a great moral daily which sets forth in display type that for the small sum of fifty cents she can secure a pair of silken garters that warned the great he-world that she's a warm baby and bid it look quick at her shapely legs think of a modest old mother in Israel watching the face of her youthful son as he learns for the first time of garters that invite him to take off your things fine Sabbath morning reading that for the so-called Christian people of Harris County such an ad would forever damn even the Nashville banner or show in the feculent columns of the Kansas City star like a splotch of soot on the marble face of Raphael's Madonna the police Gazette and Sunday Sun are fired from the males yet neither ever contained ought one half so horrible we keep the Decameron and Daudet's eroticisms under lock and key yet they are only suggestive while this is frankly feculent a brazen bid for Baudry should the iconoclast publish such a thing it would be promptly denounced from 10,000 pulpits as a pander to pruriancy yet against aniquity of the daily chippy chaser alias the Houston post not one preacher has raised his voice in protest why? because the dirty rag does not attack their religious dogma does not strike at their bread and butter the shortest route to the heart of the average parson is through his pocket hit him there and you raise a howl that startles high heaven print his church notices report his foolish little sermons, kneel with him in prayer slander, agnostics and atheists serve the iconoclast as the fowl Yahoos did gulliver flip a plug at nickel into the contribution box and you may safely flaunt the patois of the niftupov in the fair face of every honest girl between Cape Cod and the Golden Gate and as it is with the average preacher so it is with the bulk of his parishioners the post introduces the language of the prostitute into the parlors of its patrons it boasts a boys and girls club the happy hammers of more than 600 members and to these children it carries the first knowledge of sexual perversity gives them their initial lesson in social sin where this the paper's first offense we might attribute it to the carelessness or stupidity of a clerk in its counting room in the competence of its business manager but it is an old, a shameless a persistent sinner against all life's decencies and proprieties its personal column was for years the most revolting thing known to yaller journalism its counting room was an asignation post office the paper was the recognized organ of happy hollow the hell's half acre of houston it was a pander to all the worst that run riot in the tenderloin a procurer of young girls to glut the lust of godless libertines its sign was the lignione its ideal the almighty dollar through its feculent columns muckle-mouthed mag and doll-tearsheet made asignations with forks of the creek's fools while bleer-eyed bummers and rotten-livered rounders requested respectable women to meet them in their offices and wear camp-meeting lingerie the iconoclast compelled its unrespected contemporary to purify its personal column and this service to society has never been forgiven by the bench-legged hydrocephalus grand-pengendrum of that paper the post next proceeded to publish a directory of houston's red light district giving names and addresses of the madams the number of their borders the position of the merchandise thrown upon the market all that was necessary to make the post's body-house guide complete was the addition of rate cards on that little bit of journalistic enterprise the iconoclast put a kibosh also much to the satisfaction of every decent family in harris county now the feculent sheet has found a new road to infamy its advertising garters fit only to adorn the crummy underpinning negro prostitutes it does seem that the post will do anything for a dollar except be decent owing to the mental perversity of its management respectability is for it impossible it is a social leper a journalistic pariah it is devoid of political principle as a thieving tomcat of conscience it has no more stability than a bad smell in a simoon it is deified and damned every statesman by turn it has been on every possible side of every public question and wept bitter tears of regret because further change of policy were impossible it is a perfect milestone of misinformation the avatar of impudence the incarnation of infamy a social cesspool whose malodor spreads contagion like the rank breath of the gala monster or the shade of a upus tree yet its editor I am told aspires to the lieutenant governorship of Texas verily he's got his gall he will indeed be a warm baby if elevated to that inconsiderable office and permitted to monkey with the scepter while the governor is doing the elegant elsewhere Texas may certainly consider herself fortunate if he does not pawn the facies of power and blow in the proceeds of the erstwhile John Bell's variety joint should he do so he will probably be permitted to take off his things the post add is worse than that of holy John Wanamaker who once announced in the Philadelphia papers that Parisian thoughts are sown in our underwear with such lingerie I should imagine that call again garters would be the proper caper such a combination would suggest the patent medicine certificate of the happy husband who joyfully testified that my wife was so nervous that I could not sleep with her but after taking two bottles of your remarkable etc. she has so far recovered that anybody can sleep with her just what effect the Parisian thought underwear of holy John Wanamaker had upon the preeminently respectable people of Philadelphia I shall not assume to say but I should consider such goods contraband of war when found on a Sunday school park encounter imagine the result of introducing Parisian thoughts into the unbleached muslin lingerie of a lot of single standard of morals old maids there's really no telling for what Harrison's professional Sunday school superintendent is responsible he's a rank conspirator against the seventh commandment the post should be abated as an incorrigible nuisance it is a standing menace to the community it has never been a legitimate journal it's chief sources of revenue have been fake voting contests and unclean ads that range in fascination from abortion pills to garters for prostitutes what this country seems to need is a press censorship the second rate newspapers are mistaking liberty for license the dogma that public opinion can be depended upon to correct the evil is an iridescent dream the public will stand almost anything so long as its religious theses and political confessions of faith are let alone men claiming to be quasi decent if not altogether respectable will carry home day after day and suffer to be read by their young daughters such a paper as the houston post with its w y o d and take off your things advertisements its puffs of abortion pills and civil litig panaceas who would have a conniption fit and fall in it should a copy of bob ingersoll eloquent lecture on Abraham Lincoln creep into their library the stench of such a paper creeps abroad like the meloder of a cloaca be slimes the senses like the noxious exhalations of an open sewer how in God's name men can be found so debased as to work on such a sheet is beyond my comprehension I once undertook to hold down its editorial page but soon got sore at myself cursed everything connected there with from the pink haired president of the company to the pee we business manager got out purified myself and have been sick at the stomach ever since should a man lay a copy of the foul sheet on my parlor table I blow his head off with a shotgun all that I now see of the paper is the clipping sent me by disgusted Houstonians and I take those out behind the barn to read then bury them lest they poison the hogs I regard my temporary connection with the sheet much as Jean Valjean must his tramp through the Parisian sewers it is a ten legged nightmare an infamy that I can never outlive I strove manfully to make the foul thing respectable but the Augean stables proved too much for my pitchfork I managed to occasionally inject into this facilitated sheet a quasi-intelligent idea to disguise its feculence with the breath of sentiment that by contrast seemed an heir from Arabic the blessed but the stupid ignorance and dollar worshipping of the management soon dragged it back into the noisome depths of hopeless nations and subter brutish degradation poor old Houston a morning newspaper should be a city's crown of glory an intellectual aurora ushering in the newborn day but in Houston's case her chief newspaper is a sorrow's crown of sorrow her inexpungable badge of shame end of chapter 28 garters and amen groans recording by Brian Keenan


Next question is from Reese Hocky-Yunga. How to push yourself without a gym partner or hurting yourself? I think the gym partner thing is so overrated. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's sort of the messaging that I would probably put out there is like like what's, what's the real value in your gym partner? Like what, that you can't find yourself in terms of like, if you look at the right dose of intensity, the right dose for you individually. It gets muddy in terms of having like somebody there that's motivating you to kind of push past, you know, those natural signals your body's giving you in terms of like finding that sweet spot where you're going to actually adapt and build muscle versus just hammer yourself a bit too hard. That's the problem with our space is we value motivation so much. I hate that.  Like, oh, it's so much more motivating to my friend or my friend motivates me. It's just like, stop it. If you want this to be a lifelong pursuit for you, you've got to get rid of this idea that you need to be motivated to do the thing. Imagine if everything was like that. I know. I only do things I'm motivated to do. It'll never last. You know how much stuff I wouldn't do. Where's my reading partner? Yeah. I'm not going to read without my reading partner. That's why I can't stand it because it's just, it's a terrible message and our space promotes it so much. And we, we lean into it and so many. Because it feels good. Fitness influencers want to be motivating. Yeah. It gives you this initial feel good feeling. But for our listeners, like it's such a, it's a, it's a bad strategy. Like learn to be disciplined. Learn to create habits. And you're far better off doing that for yourself. Somebody is always suffering. If there's a partner workout, whoever is leading it is getting the most benefits because they're doing what they probably want to do or need to do for their body. And then the other person is suffering because it's not what is ideal for them. And even if that's what motivates you to go to the gym, eventually they're not going to be around. Eventually you're going to move. Eventually they're going to get married and have kids. Eventually shit's going to happen. And so you need to start to learn how to create habits that you don't need anybody else. That doesn't mean that you can't have fun. Yeah. Or meet somebody there. Yeah. I'm not saying, I'm not shaming somebody who has a workout partner. I'm just saying that we put too much emphasis on motivation and this need for other people to be a part of our workout. Let me put it like this with workout partners. I have nothing, I have no issue with workout partners except for the following. Okay. Imagine you're about to embark on your fitness journey and you know that this is going to be something that if I want it to be effective and real, I have to do for the rest of my life. Okay. So I'm not going to do this for a month and then stop. The goal is to do this for the rest of my life. Now you got to go find a workout partner that's going to work out with you on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at four, whatever your time is forever. Okay. Good luck. First of all, there's almost nobody you'd want to see three days a week for an hour. Oh yeah. Forever. And depend on that type of consistency to show up, to work out, to want to be around this person. Like that's a tough, and nobody talks about this. This is actually kind of funny. Breaking up with workout partners. I've had people cancel gym memberships because they don't want to break up with their workout partner. So they'd rather go to another gym because then they, because otherwise they'd break up with a workout partner. And then they're worried about running into them at the gym when they work out on their own or whatever.  Cause then you got to tell them, hey, listen, you show up late every time or I just not really working type of deal and it's a friend or someone, you know, type of deal. Yeah, no. Now here's the other part of this. The majority of people who are not getting good results is because they're not showing up. Not because they're not working out hard enough. Now, yes, there are people who need to work out harder. But that's not the big problem. That's, it's a problem, but it's a small one in comparison to just showing up. So about this, like I need someone to push me. If you showed up and you just show up, then you're probably going to be okay. Well, now that we're done ragging on you for wanting a workout partner to answer this question, though, if you were trying to push yourself more, so in other words, increase the intensity in my workout without risking injury or hurting myself because I don't have someone, let's say, to spot myself. One of my favorite things to do is to choose a weight that's difficult for me. So let's say I'm doing a five by five, so I'm doing five reps. I choose a weight that is difficult, but I know I'm going to probably be able to get five because I don't have a spotter, so I don't want something I'm going to fail at doing. And then as I get to the last rep or two, I slow the tempo down dramatically. If you take somebody who does this kind of cadence where this is what a bench press tempo looks like for them and they're like, oh wow, this rep number three is easy. Oh wow, rep number four is easy. Now watch this.   Like this idea that you need to have these sets that take you to failure so much that you need to spot. And by the way, most people that even do that do this wrong. It used to be one of my pet peeves when somebody would spot me and they do this, come on bro, come on bro, you got it.  And you have to know how to like dump weight and you have to know all these ways of getting out of those situations and set up safeties and all that kind of stuff. There's a way to do that very effectively and there's a lot more machines, racks and things that have those available. So, you know, look, ask somebody or how to like set that up, but even just in a basic like squat, like you should know that technique of being able to dump the weight and bail and not feel bad about like slam the weights. Listen, people don't hurt themselves working out because they didn't have a gym partner. They hurt themselves because they picked an inappropriate weight for what they were trying to do or they had bad technique or bad form, that's all. It's not because you didn't have a workout partner. It's because you're doing it wrong. That's it. That's the bottom line. I think I've seen more bad technique in form with a workout partner than I have alone. I'll make a bet right now. I don't know if there's any statistics on it, but I bet you people get hurt more often with workout partners than when they work out on their own. Yes. Because you get somebody who they... Oh, he'll help me lift this off. They take it to great strategy to push so hard to where you fail and get stuck.  And then you try and help the weight up with every other muscle than the one you're really trying to work. The technique goes out the window. Yeah. And then it defeats the purpose of why you're doing the movement. So, yeah, I've never been a big fan of the workout partner thing. And most of the workouts that I ever worked out was someone else. I led the workout because selfishly, I want to do what I want to do. I'm like, I know what I need to do. I know how much I need to push today. I know how many sets I need to do of what. Like, so, okay, if you want to jump in my workout and follow on what I'm doing, that's fine. But, you know, telling my workout to what somebody else potentially needs is just not ideal. And you don't need that person to take you to, you can have an intense workout and not take, take every exercise to failure. I hurt myself with workout partners way more often. Yes. Trying to show off. You got a weight that you, oh, they'll help me lift it. And like, first off, a spotter on squatting. Terrible. You're going to get, That's where I really hurt my knee. Yes. Terrible idea. Okay. They end up moving you forward and the whole weight crushed me forward. Yeah. Spotting on like a bench press. Everybody thinks that's a great idea. If you're picking a weight that you could, you're afraid that you're not going to be able to get up with the spotter.  So, also not a good idea. Spotters with dumbbells. That's an interesting one, you know. You guys ever do this where you're, I was a kid, we do like the dumbbell chest press. Of course, when I was a kid, you know, it was all about how much weight you could lift type of deal. Yeah. Where they spot you under the elbows, you end up hitting yourself in the face of the dumbbell. It comes in. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That ever happened to you? That's a good time. Yeah. Then you learn the technique of how to do it yourself. So much better. No, no, no. You got to train with the right intensity. Don't go to failure. Stop a couple reps short. Have good technique. And if you're going to max out, use safeties on a power rack. And that's about it. Then you'll be set.