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Since Ruskin's savage response to a Glasgow invitation to lecture "first burn your city, and cleanse your river," a new generation of architects and hygienists have not a little transformed the one, and vigorous measures have been taken towards the purification of the other.
"The ocean which surrounds the earth was made salt by God so it should not stink," said the legend, "and to keep it salt is the special work of God." To celebrate God's act, the priests of Polynesia blessed waters for purification, for prayer, and for public and private ceremonies, and to exorcise demons and drive away diseases, as the priests of America and Europe do.
To use for a moment the language of mystical theology, conversion, or repentance, the first step towards the spiritual life, consists in a change in the direction of these cravings and desires; purgation or purification, in which the work begun in conversion is made complete, in their steadfast setting in order or re-education, and that refinement and fixation of the most desirable among them which we call the formation of habit, and which is the essence of character building.
In this Russian custom the passage of the image through the fire, if it is not simply a purification, may possibly be a sun-charm; the killing of the god is a separate act, and the mode of killing him by drowning is probably a rain-charm.
They are a great whole, setting forth the 'mystery of the kingdom' in its method of establishment, its corruption, its outward and inward growth, the conditions of entrance into it, and its final purification. The sacred number seven, impressed upon them, is the token of completeness.
The drama was to represent a process of inward purification, the attainment, after fierce storms and buffetings, of a calm haven for the soul.
The design and object of this Institution is to reclaim the youthful criminal by firm but kind and judicious treatment; to make his prison a place of purification and improvement, not of demoralisation and corruption; to impress upon him that there is but one path, and that one sober industry, which can ever lead him to happiness; to teach him how it may be trodden, if his footsteps have never yet been led that way; and to lure him back to it if they have strayed: in a word, to snatch him from destruction, and restore him to society a penitent and useful member.
There are those who believe that with the increased purification of the Thames, the next generation may perhaps throw a salmon-fly from Chiswick Eyot. In the early summer of 1895 a fine porpoise appeared above the island. At half-past eight it followed the ebb down the river, having "proved" the stream for forty miles from its mouth, and being apparently well pleased with its condition.
This completes the rite, which is known as LEMAWA. A similar rite of purification is practised by most of the other peoples. In some cases the principal feature of the rite of purification is being spat upon by the chief.
Yes, there can be little danger of sinking into barren formulae, into glib aesthetic prattle about Renascence, in a movement of which one expression is the purification of those plaguy, if picturesque, Closes, which are the foul blot upon the beautiful Athens of the North.
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