A SERMON PREACHED BY
REV. J. F. CLYMER,
IN THE FIRST METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, AUBURN, NEW YORK,
ON SUNDAY, JUNE 20TH, 1880.
“If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the
voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and that when they
have chastened him, will not hearken unto them, then shall his father
and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of
his city, and unto the gates of his place; and they shall say unto the
elders of his city: _This our son is stubborn and rebellious; he will
not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard._”—DEUT. xxi. 18-20.
We have had much teaching that has left the impression on our minds
that the soul is the _only_ source and seat of all the vice in human
life. Because it is written “The imaginations of the thoughts of the
natural heart, are only evil continually,” total depravity has been
fixed on the spirit nature of man; that is, all the bad or immoral
elements entering into human life have been attributed to the innate
or inborn ugliness of the soul. Accepting the Scriptural truth that
“the soul that sinneth, it shall die,” we have come to think that sin
has its _center_, _seat_, _source and circumference_ in the soul, or
the immaterial nature of man. Hence we readily admit the fact that
influences, good or bad, may pass over from the soul to the body, but
we do not so readily admit that _other_ fact, equally true, that
influence good or bad may go over from the _body_ to the soul. The road
over which vicious thoughts and lustful imaginations pass from the soul
to the body is the highway over which unbridled appetites, unrestrained
passions and unsubdued lusts in the body may go to the soul, goading
it to the wildest conceptions of vice and lecherous imaginations. The
warm rays of the sun may gender rottenness in the muddy pool; so also
will the effluvia from the pool poison the sunlight near it. The soul
by its vicious thoughts and imaginations will entail an immoral tone on
the body; so also will the body react on the soul, by its appetites,
passions and propensities, increasing the viciousness of the soul by
pushing it to courses of vice not directly and immediately its own. In
our text is found an illustration of this thought. A father and mother
bring their stubborn and rebellious son to the elders of the Jewish
church. They assign, as the cause of his stubbornness and rebellion,
gluttony and drunkenness, than which there are no vices that demoralize
the body more, or goad the soul to greater crimes. Hear it:
“This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice,
he is a glutton and a drunkard.” That is, bad conditions of the physical
nature, wrought by gluttony and drunkenness, have made him stubborn and
rebellious. It will not help the case to say that his stubbornness and
rebellion caused his gluttony and drunkenness, for if they did, then
his soul must act on the body. His morals must influence his manners,
and therefore his manners must reflect on his morals; they must
interact, which is just the point we make; that his appetite and lust
fire the temperament or disposition, and a fiery disposition provokes
appetite and lust to wilder indulgences.
A remarkable fact, in this day of advanced science and revelation, is
that Christians and moralists in their work of reform have paid so
little attention to the influence of the body on the soul. Jesus Christ
more than any other teacher or reformer recognized the demoralizing
and debasing influence of bad bodily conditions. Hence he almost
always healed maladies of the body before he entered his principles
upon the soul. It is true that his many miracles on the bodies of men
were primarily intended to reveal his divinity; yet divinity in its
manifestations always runs over the whole line of the natural before
passing into the supernatural; therefore Christ’s miracles on the
bodies of men had a sanitary side to them. The man with the leprosy was
in the poorest condition bodily to hear favorably any talk about moral
sweetness; hence Christ healed his diseased body, in connection with
his moral teachings. His example with the blind and hungry and deaf in
this respect ought not to go for nothing with those of us who seek to
save men in our day. Philanthropists and Christians for the most part
have overlooked the power of a debased body on the soul. They forget
that Paul likens a body that has sinful habitudes to a thing of death,
as compared with the soul that seeks to live the new life in Christ
Jesus. Therefore good men have labored to create in themselves and
those whom they seek to reform, certain emotional conditions of the
spirit, by a tenacious adherence to creeds, or the patient performance
of a set round of religious duties, and all this regardless of bad
physical conditions begotten by bad habits of eating and drinking.
While they have been struggling to bring their own souls and the souls
of others into holy attitudes, all the basilar forces of the body have
run riot within, and perhaps beyond, the pale of human customs and
human laws. If you want to empty a boiler of steam, it will not help
you much by lifting the safety valve if you still keep water in the
boiler and fire in the furnace. Prayer, Bible reading and Psalm singing
will not help a man much to get rid of his sins, if he keeps up a set
of bodily habits which fire the body and inflame the soul to continue
its sinning. That you may see the connection more clearly between
vice and victuals, let me show you how food may damage our bodies and
demoralize our souls.
I am fully aware of the difficulties I encounter in entering this
thought on your minds. Because religion has been considered as having
little or nothing to do with the body, I shall encounter the settled
opinions of good men to this effect. Because our popular methods of
eating have the sanction of custom and the defense of long established
habits, I may not criticise them without losing the favor of those who
are content with things as they are. Because I shall call in question
many indulgences of appetite hitherto considered sinless, I shall run
the risk of being called a fanatic or fool. Because I shall preach the
New Testament doctrine of self-denial many will say this is a hard
saying—“who can bear it?” But with the hope that I may unfold to you a
glorious realm of liberty from the bondage of bodily propensities, I
cheerfully do my duty and leave the consequences for God to look after.
Very few of us are aware of the great physical demoralization and
spiritual wickedness, brought on us and our children, by bad habits of
eating, as to the kind of food, the mode of its preparation, and the
manner and times of taking it. We refuse to think of our indulgences
of appetite as the cause of our physical ailments and premature death,
and much less will we allow ourselves to believe that these indulgences
have anything to do with forming our morals or shaping our characters
or determining our eternal destiny.
And yet I aver, without the fear of successful refutation, that
three-fourths of all our bodily ailments or diseases, and many of our
immoral acts, are the legitimate results of improper dietetic habits.
If these habits do not effect us directly, they do so indirectly by
lowering the tone of the whole system, physical and moral, causing us
to break down prematurely into some disease or deviltry, under the
pressure of legitimate toil or immoral provocation. How is it possible
to account for the death of one half the human family before five years
of age, unless we trace it to the violation of physical laws in some
way connected with the eating habits alike of parent and child? Many
children enter the world with such a low state of inherited physical
vitality, and so little moral tone, that they are unable to resist
the attacks of bodily disease or throw it off when on them, and much
less able to throw off moral disease and rise above their immoral
heritage if spared to pass through childhood to years of maturity. Such
children not only carry in their little bodies the physical weaknesses
of their parents, but also the specific immoral tendencies found in
the conditions of their parentage. And more than this, should their
endowment of vitality be sufficient to carry them over the death line
for infants, they are subject to such unnatural relations to dress and
diet that it becomes a natural impossibility for them to live. In this
way many children die prematurely, not by the arbitrary edict of God,
but by the violation of law. And if God should save their lives by
special suspension of his laws, more damage would be done to the moral
harmony of the universe than to let them die. I know it is a common
custom to ascribe all sickness and death to the direct and arbitrary
action of Divine Providence. That is, if one overeats, or eats
innutritious food, or at improper times, making himself sickly, so that
he becomes an easy prey to disease, and dies suddenly or at the noon
tide of life, all the good people say—“What a strange Providence!” As
if God had everything to do with such a death, and the deceased had
little or nothing to do with it. I incline to the opinion that Divine
Providence has little or nothing to do with such deaths only in so
far as Divine Providence is in the laws of life violated. The primary
cause of all premature deaths is violated law. God does not arbitrarily
kill anybody. Most of those who die in infancy or in early life, come
to death by the violation of God’s laws written in their bodies. If
these laws were obeyed in us and in our ancestry, most of us ought to
live beyond three score years and ten, and drop from this life into
the other in a ripe, mellow old age, just as ripe fruit drops from its
bough in autumn time. But you ask where is God in the many untimely
deaths that occur? I answer He is present in his great hearted goodness
to help the dying to an eternal victory over death, if they will only
let Him. He is present to bind up the hearts that are breaking with
sorrow for the departed, and to make a sudden, untimely, and needless
death a monument of warning to those still living, thus making the
wrath of man to praise Him. If therefore our children die in infancy,
because we have entailed on them feeble bodies by our violation of law,
God does not kill them, but they die through violated law, and he in
His goodness takes the little ones to His bosom, the seat and source of
all law. Let us not then charge our sorrows to the willful enactment
of our Heavenly Father. He taketh no pleasure in the death of him that
dieth. When he gives life to us, He intends that we shall keep it as
long as possible.
Having given us life, all the forces of His boundless nature are
engaged to maintain it in us until He is ready to harvest us as the
farmer does the ripened grain. The God of nature and the God of grace
are not in antagonism. “The one God is in all and over all.” A kingdom
divided against itself cannot stand. If, therefore, we die this side
of three score years and ten—seventy years—we die untimely. It is high
time that good men were awake to this fact, and ceased charging over
to Divine Providence what legitimately belongs to ourselves. “Jesus
Christ came to destroy him that hath the power of death, that is the
devil;” and when the philosophy of Jesus is wrought up into human lives
by obedience to physical laws, the power of disease and death over
our bodies will be very much broken. The victory over death can be so
far achieved by men in the body that they need not die until their
minds and hearts have received all the development in this world that
infinite love ordains. That is, men may so baffle the monster of death
by obedience to law as to keep him at bay until their souls have taken
on such Christly ripeness that they shall burst and break their bodies,
as the ripening chestnuts break their burrs under the frosts of autumn.
We have, therefore, no right to ascribe to supernatural agency any
phenomena which can be explained on natural principles. Disobedience
to law brings penalties. There is nothing that men need to see more in
their efforts at reform than the connection between their sufferings
and their disobedience. Now, disobedience to the laws of life brings
the penalties, sickness and premature death. There is no field where
our disobedience manifests itself more frequently and with so little
thought of consequences, as in our false and unnatural habits of eating
and drinking, which damage the body and demoralize the soul.
“The Blood is the Life.” This is the declaration alike of revelation and
of science. Evolutionary processes may induce a variation in the form
or number of the blood corpuscles, but they can not set aside the law
that the building and rebuilding of all the organs involved in bodily
or mental acts comes from the blood alone. The physical, mental and
moral natures are so intimately connected that that which affects one,
affects the others. So that a man’s mental and moral nature, as well
as his physical, can very largely be determined by the quality of his
blood. Now it is a physiological fact that our blood is made out of
the food we eat. That food which enters the mouth and is assimilated,
makes blood. By the marvelous processes of digestion and assimilation
our food is transformed into blood; and the blood passing through the
veins and arteries repairs the waste tissues and forms new ones, thus
building up our bodies and sustaining life. It follows then that our
bodies are made of the food we eat. Evidently it was the design of
our Creator that the prime object of eating should be the building up
of tissue—muscles, bones and brains. That this may be a pleasure to
us, He has associated with eating the delights of appetite. But most
of us have so far perverted the divine order as to make the pleasures
of appetite the chief object of eating. “Give us something _good_ to
eat,” is the great cry of humanity, and the goodness of food is gauged
by the sensations of the palate and not by the law of nutrition. Most
of us determine the goodness of our food by the amount of sensual
delight it imparts to the palate, no matter how much damage it may
do beyond to the delicate and intricate structure of the stomach and
viscera. Hence a vast amount of food enters the mouth that makes bad
blood, blood that in itself is corrupt, and carries poisonous particles
to every organ in the system, putting us in splendid condition to be
easily provoked to some outburst of anger, passion or revenge. My
hearers, there is a sure and vital connection between bad blood and
bad morals. Blood always tells in morals as well as in muscles. Blood
has power throughout the whole realm of life, whether it be in a human
body, in society, or in the body of a horse on the racecourse.
You ask, what kind of food makes bad blood? I answer, very much of the
flesh of animals, that forms the staple diet of most of us. Sty-fed
pigs and stall-fed oxen are fattened under the most unlawful and
unhealthful conditions possible; shut up in the dark, cut off from
exercise, the fat deposited on their bodies is made up of the waste
matter that the life-forces of the animal have been unable to expel.
This waste fatty matter, surcharged with unexpelled excretions, is
liable to induce disease in all who consume it. It has established
tuberculosis in captive lions, and in cats and dogs, and in other
carnivora; and it were folly to assume that mankind, feeding upon
such poisonous food, should wholly escape. Even in the living animal
this effete unexpelled poisonous waste breeds vermin, such as have
been found in pork, which cannot be destroyed by ordinary cooking or
by the process of digestion, and hence live and generate in the human
body, producing disease and death. I am not now making a plea for the
absolute disuse of animal food, but against the bad quality of very
much of it, and also against the inordinate use of that which may be
good in quality. A certain amount of animal food is useful for our
nourishment, especially in winter time, because of its heat producing
qualities. But meat every day, and at every meal, is in no way
necessary for the proper sustenance of the human system.
The use of large quantities of animal food, however free from
disease-germs, as a _staple_ article of diet makes the blood gross,
coarse and corrupt, filling the body with scrofulous elements, sending
poison to every part of the system, causing it to break out in running
sores, salt-rheum, tetter and the like, producing an inordinate
appetite, throwing every organ of the body into frictional relations
to every other organ. It is a matter of every-day surprise to me
that any human being will consent to eat the flesh of pigs. Consider
their uncleanness, their selfish, greedy habits, the vast amount of
corruption that enters into their bodies, their want of exercise,
their impure breathing, their lack of sudorific glands or emunctories,
through which effete tissues and morbid accumulations may be expelled;
and think, when you eat pork, of the train of horrid elements which
enter into your body. And your body thus debased by a low order of
animal flesh, the effect must be to make you take on the disposition
and tendencies of the hog. God’s bill of fare in the eleventh chapter
of Leviticus excluded from the tables of the Jews the hog and all water
animals except those that had fins and scales. This bill of fare was
given to the Jews not only for the preservation of their health, but,
as God’s great purpose was moral reform, He had an eye single to their
moral condition in the matter of their eating. Does any one doubt that
the unhealthy, ugly, and vicious elements that make up the flesh of
most of the animals we eat, enter our blood, and in that way affect the
disposition or carriage of the soul? I am confident, if there was less
demand for animal food the quality would be very much better. Animals
would not be subject to false and unhealthy generation, and false and
hasty methods of growth. They would come up more in keeping with the
laws of their nature, and come to us with more healthy and better
qualities. As for the hog, if man would not domesticate him, he could
not propagate his species. He would become extinct just like the lion,
leopard, and hyena, under the march of civilization. As the blessings
of civilized life reach us, you notice the carnivorous or flesh-eating
animals become extinct. So it seems to me that with the developments of
civilization there ought to be such moral refinements in human beings
that they would grow away from their carnivorous tendencies, and eat
such food as tends to develop the mental and moral faculties, and not
the animal propensities. Among animals you find that those that live on
the flesh of other animals are the most vicious and destructive, such
as the lion, leopard, and hyena. Those animals that live on the grains
and the higher order of foods are the best, most beautiful, and most
useful, such as the horse and cow. If this law obtains among animals,
why not among men? Beyond a doubt it does. If you want proof of this,
study the character and lives of those who live largely on animal food,
and you will find them very animal-like in all their relations—restive,
impatient, passionate, ugly in their ways, fiery in their disposition,
easily provoked, readily put out of humor. And if you could look into
their private lives you would find all their baser qualities having the
fullest sway, stopping, it may be, inside the fence of human laws and
customs, but seldom considering the claims of a higher and divine law.
I charge, then, very much of our household misery, domestic woe, and
connubial wretchedness, to unrestrained lust begotten in the body by
the inordinate use of animal food.
We forget, my hearers, that the great law of nature, “Like produces
like,” is universal. “Every seed after its kind is the law of all
creation.” There is no exception to this law. This principle obtains
not only in the production of life, but in the processes of its
development. If my position about the intimacy of soul and body is
true, then, if a man’s body is made up chiefly of flesh taken from
diseased animals, and his whole physical frame is saturated with the
irritating and exciting condiments of what is popularly called good
food, the whole bias of his bodily powers will be toward animalism.
All the impressions and impulses that the soul receives from such a
body are beastly and debasing. Like produces like in the formation of
physical tissue out of food, as well as in the generation of stock in
the stall. Hence I hold that very much of the wickedness of mankind
is the natural expression of physical beastliness rather than the
outflow of innate viciousness. A body made up largely of all manner of
nerve-goading, passion-producing, anger-generating elements, such as
are found in the gross animal dishes with their stimulating adjuncts,
just as surely drives the soul to sin as a tempest drives a feather
before it.
As modern research has proved that bad or imperfect food when
digested surely makes bad or imperfect blood, incapable of performing
its appointed work of upbuilding and of reparation, so has science
demonstrated that perfect food is one of the most potent among
remedies for the relief of many diseased conditions. Since the blood
is the life, and since blood is merely food emulsified, mingled with
certain digestive fluids and colored by the oxygen with which it is
brought in contact in the lungs—it is easy to understand how perfect
food may create perfect blood, which shall presently supplant that
which is feeble, that which is lacking in waste-repairing power, that
which fails to give strength to the muscles or vigor to the brain,
and may thus become the most effective medicine. A perusal of recent
professional medical literature evinces the great stress which is now
laid upon dietetics in the treatment of all diseases. The approach to
this high altitude has been gradual, but sure. At first foods were made
the vehicles for drugs; and cod-liver oil and malt-extracts, which are
only concentrated foods of the hydro-carbon varieties, were loaded with
lime and iron and strychnine and phosphorous and scores of other drugs.
But perfect results were secured by the use of these foods without
the drug additions, and so the foods were at last given the credit
which all along belonged to them. And so it has come to pass that with
advanced medical men, in a vast majority of cases of sickness, the
support of the life-powers by proper nutrients is the foremost thought,
the best food proving to be the best medicine.
The kind of food a man eats, and the time and manner of his eating it,
are not merely a question of medicine, but one of the first questions
of morals. The effects of food on the passions and feelings are thus
described by Prior:
“Observe the various operations
Of food and drink in several nations;
Was ever Tartar fierce and cruel
Upon the strength of water gruel?
But who shall stand his rage and force
When first he rides, then eats, his horse?
Salads and eggs and lighter fare,
Tune the Italian spark’s guitar;
And if I take Don Confrere right,
Pudding and beef make Britons fight.”
If, therefore, our meat has something to do with our morals, or if our
food in some way affects our faith, it seems to me that many of our
efforts at moral reform ought to be preceded by instruction in hygiene.
In other words, efforts to make a man genuinely devotional ought to be
prefaced by efforts to correct bad dietetic habits. A father, by prayer
and precept and flogging, had done his best to reform his boy, whose
staple diet was meat and sausage and pie and cake at his meals, with
lunch between. The family physician said to the father, “If you will
put a leech back of each of your boy’s ears once a week for a month,
you will do more to reform him than your preaching and pounding will do
in a year.” The father asked for the philosophy of this prescription.
“Why,” said the doctor, “your boy has bad blood, and too much of it;
he must behave badly or he would burst.” “Then,” said the father,
“I’ll change his diet from beef and pie to hominy and milk.” In three
months thereafter a better boy for his age could not be found in the
neighborhood. The acrid, biting, evil blood had not become food for
leeches, but it had done its wicked work and passed away, and a cooler,
blander, purer, safer blood had been supplied from sweeter, gentler
food sources.
In your use of animal food be very particular as to quality and
quantity. Lamb and mutton are considered the most healthy by the
authorities. Avoid as you would contagion the use of pork, unless you
raise it yourselves, and feed it with good grain, and not the refuse
of the house or barn, and keep the animals as clean as you do your pet
dogs. Never fry your meat with hogs’ lard, but stew, bake, boil, or
broil it. Use hogs’ lard in no form for cooking. Most of it is said to
be reeking with scrofulous elements. Displace it in _all_ your cooking
by milk or butter. If you want to aid and not hinder the growth of your
soul Godward, if you desire to have pure thoughts and a pure heart and
a pure life, see that you make your blood out of pure food, or you
will find that your soul will have an enemy within the castle of its
body more treacherous and deadly than any of its enemies without.
There is another popular article of food among us, which has a vital
connection with bodily disorders and bad exhibition of character. Good
in proper quantities and in its sphere, when made the largest and chief
article of diet, for every meal, the one kind of food upon which we
depend most for building up the wastes of our bodies, it indirectly
does great damage. I refer to the ordinary fine flour bread made out of
bolted wheat meal.
It is proper to remember that the white flour from which our bread
is chiefly made, and which is deemed the staff of life, is a purely
artificial product—a selection from that perfect food combination
which exists in wheat. A competent food chemist has compared the
regular milling processes to one by which the fat part of an ox should
be saved for food, and the lean part—the albuminous or nitrogenous
portion—discarded and given to the dogs. The comparison is well based,
since the starch of wheat, which is valued because of its whiteness,
is a carbo-hydrate, chemically allied to the fat of meat; while the
dark nutriment of wheat, which, because of its color, is discarded with
the bran with which it is found in contact in nature, is a vegetable
nitrogenous albumen, rich in mineral elements, and almost identical,
chemically, with the lean or muscular tissue of beef.
The process of bolting or refining takes from the wheat most of the
phosphates and nitrates, the elements that are chiefly required for
making nerves, muscles, bones, and brains. The phosphates and nitrates
being removed by bolting, very little remains in the flour except
the starchy carbonates, the heat and fat producing elements. The use
of fine flour bread as a staple article of food introduces too much
heat and fat-producing elements into the system, and where there is
too much carbon or heating substance, it tends rather to provoke the
system to unnatural and abnormal action, and instead of serving as an
element to warm the body, its tendency is to burn or consume, heating
and irritating all the organs, getting one into that state which is
popularly known as “hot-blooded.” The fine white flour ordinarily
used has two-thirds of the nitrogenous and mineral nutriment that God
put in the wheat taken out. Unless these deficiencies are made up by
some other foods, the exclusive use of fine flour bread will leave
the nerves and bones poorly nourished, producing in some systems
nervousness, dyspepsia, and all the physical ills that follow these
diseases, together with impatience, fretfulness, and irritability. God
intended that all the nutritive properties He put in the wheat should
stay in it for purposes of symmetrical nourishment. Fine flour bread
may be used for purposes of producing heat in the system, but it does
not feed hungry nerves or starving bones.
One reason why children fed chiefly on white bread feel hungry nearly
all the time, and demand so much food between meals, is found in the
fact that their bodies are insufficiently nourished. Their bones
and nerves not receiving the nitrates and phosphates they need, are
suffering from hunger.
When children are fed with food that thoroughly nourishes their whole
system, they will seldom desire to eat between meals and thus retard
the process of digestion and lay the foundation for dyspepsia and all
its kindred evils.
Flour made of all the nutriment of pure white wheat, unbolted, yet
without the shell or husk or bran, contains all the elements necessary
for the nourishment of the body. The flour called Graham flour rarely
contains these elements. There is a great deal of bogus stuff in the
market, which has brought the genuine article into disrepute, and made
many thoughtful people disgusted with everything in that line. Very
much that is called Graham flour is made up of a mixture of fine bolted
flour, and the woody fibre of the wheat, which has no nutriment in it
at all. This wretched fabrication has tended to make all whole wheat
products unpopular. The woody bran is worse than worthless as food,
or to mix with food. You might as well eat the shells of nuts, or the
husks of corn, or the skins of potatoes, as the silex coats of wheat.
To overload the alimentary canal with such foreign indigestible matter
has no other tendency but to weaken and debilitate it. Very few millers
trouble themselves to make a perfect whole wheat flour. I know but one
establishment in the world where wheat and other grains are treated
precisely as they should be, with all the harmful part removed and the
rest made digestible by harmless methods, and that is the Health Food
Company of New York.[1]
[1] See Appendix, page 30.
Bread leavened, or unleavened, made out of what is called the Cold
Blast Whole Wheat Flour, makes more muscle and furnishes more food for
the nerves than any other article of food given to man except the pure
gluten of wheat. I am not now advocating the views of the extremists,
the Grahamites, neither do I counsel the disuse of fine flour bread.
This latter should be used in connection with unbolted flour, but
should not be relied on to furnish you with all the nutritious elements
that your bodies need. There is a golden mean between the extremes
of vegetarianism and exclusive flesh diet which the common sense of
thoughtful people will find. During the warm season a diet made up
chiefly of fruits, grains, and vegetables will be most healthful
for body and soul. Instead of the scrofula-breeding pork or ham for
breakfast, use some one of the great variety of grains, especially
oat-meal, than which there are few better foods for growing children
and hard working adults. Instead of fried cakes, rich pastry, and
candies, use fruit, of which there is an abundant variety, ten-fold
more nourishing than pies or cakes, and very cleansing to the blood.
Let brown bread, Johnnie-cake, and corn-meal pudding supplant fine
wheat bread as much as possible. Eat your meals regularly and slowly,
eating nothing between them. Eat sparingly of meat at mid-day, and let
it be good fresh beef, mutton, or fish, well cooked. Let the evening
meal be taken not later than six o’clock. Discard tea and coffee, and
make your own coffee with browned crusts of bread, or burned whole
wheat.[2] Follow these suggestions and you will find very many of the
ills of your body departing and very many of the troubles you have in
behaving yourselves, vanishing.
[2] The Health Food Company prepare a “Cereal Coffee” from Wheat Gluten
and Barley, which not only makes a delicious beverage, but tends
to greatly strengthen both body and brain. Those who would release
themselves from the dangerous practice of tea-drinking, and the less
injurious but still objectionable use of the commercial coffees, will
do well to try this nutrient beverage.
Again, we derange our bodies and demoralize our souls by eating too
much. The great end of life with many of us is to eat. The American
dining-room has become, for the most part, a place for the indulgence
of animalism, and not for the development of the affections or social
qualities. A distinguished American physician said: “I am sixty-six
years old, and I have eaten enough food to answer my wants for 100
years, and yet I am what most people call a small eater.” The popular
habit of using, inordinately, appetizers in the shape of the ordinary
table condiments, begets a false and unnatural appetite. The time comes
when honest food palls upon the depraved senses. The pampered, jaded
appetite no longer finds satisfaction in simple food-flavors; the
palate must be prompted with pungent things. The cook, who is never a
physiologist, responds to the demand for spurs to appetite, and finds
them in mixtures of spices and peppers and mustards and acids and
essential oils and chemicals, and multitudes of non-food substances.
With these, and various biting alcohols, the delicate lining of the
stomach is inflamed, inducing a desire for food which passes for what
it is not, namely, honest appetite. The palate demands more food than
the stomach can digest or the system assimilate. Poor nature, anxious
to do the best she can, adapts herself to the unnatural situation,
and forces all the other organs to do the same; and thus we become
accustomed to over-eating and do not know it.
That all who accustom themselves to a stimulating diet, to spices and
wines and other irritating things, consume too much food, cannot, I
think, be gainsayed. The amount and kind of food needed depends upon
the individual habits and the kind of waste to be supplied. A wholly
idle man should thrive well on cucumbers and water-melons, which are
chiefly water; while the hard-working hod-carrier would demand several
pounds of solid carbon and nitrogen daily. It is the sedentary, the
well-to-do, the man of leisure, who suffers most from over-eating; and
it behooves him to carefully avoid all goads and spurs to appetite.
With the simplest flavors he is nearly certain to over-eat and thus to
suffer. With an appetite stimulated and induced, without corresponding
out-door labor to create a genuine need and demand for it, digestive
failure and assimilative bankruptcy is only a question of time.
The stomach, overloaded, performs its work imperfectly, and thus
imposes on all the organs an extra amount of work, which breaks them
down prematurely, causing diseases of every kind, such as nervous
headache, sick headache, rush of blood to the head, apoplexy, sore
eyes, deafness, erysipelas, neuralgia of the face, decayed teeth,
catarrh, bronchitis, asthma, nausea, common colic, congestion of the
liver, and a host of other diseases too unpleasant to mention. In some
cases there is a disposition of too much fatty matter in the system;
and many people suppose that fatness is a sign of healthfulness, which
is false. No one needs any more fat on his body than is essential to
form cushions for his tendons and muscles; if too much, there is a
depletion of strength.
The crowded and overloaded condition of the system makes the body take
on very many false manifestations. The irritation produced in an
overcharged system manifests itself in different forms in different
individuals. In some it produces nervousness, making them rack the
flesh off their bones and keeping them poor; and in others it produces
sluggishness, retaining defunct matter in the system, making them
corpulent. As I have said, our highly-seasoned foods create morbid and
abnormal appetites.
As a consequence we eat too much and too often, the system being borne
down by overwork in its digestive department, there comes a demand for
stimulating drinks and medicines to take off the depression and to keep
up tone; and to make ourselves feel good, after having made ourselves
feel bad, by improper eating, some of us resort to tea and coffee, and
others to alcohol, and then the excitement produced demands a sedative,
and some of us smoke and others chew a poisonous weed called tobacco.
Thus the poor body, subject to these revulsions of unnatural action in
overwork and stimulation and sedation, is goaded to abnormities and
unnatural action, sending up to the soul no other influences but those
which drive it to moral madness and vicious deeds.
Now, vice is a morbid exhibition of the will. The will is represented
through the physical organ, the brain, and the brain is straightway
affected by the condition of the body and the state of the blood. The
will is that power of the mind by which we put forth volitions and
perform actions. If the pressure of bad blood is on the brain, that
same pressure is on the will; hence a sick man or a diseased man will
do a great many bad things through the power of bad blood on the will.
Vice, then, is both the result and cause of physical derangement.
Hence that vice of vices, drunkenness.
Drunkenness may be caused by bad physical conditions, brought about
by bad habits of eating. Would it not be well for us to look into
bad table habits for one of the reasons why so many of our young men
become drunkards? May there not be some cause working in the flesh
of our youths, driving them to intemperance? May it not be possible
that kind fathers and mothers for years have been filling up the awful
gap of 40,000 dead drunkards annually by feeding their children upon
stimulating, highly-seasoned, innutritious foods? There is no doubt
in my mind that every man is a glutton before he is a drunkard. If
nature’s laws are violated, a man’s sensations will be all abnormal,
and the mainsprings of his life will be befouled, and the result
will be irregular and vicious expressions of all the appetites, both
for food and drink. I am, therefore, confident that the widespread
appetite for intoxicating liquors is largely due to the false relations
that the American people hold to their food. We cannot hope much
from moral suasion and legal enactments so long as we overlook the
physical condition of the drunkard. If you would cure disease or vice
effectually, you must shut off that which nourishes them, instead of
putting all your force in efforts to antidote them. “Let the wicked
forsake his way,” and then turn unto the Lord, and he will have mercy
on him, and to our God, and he will abundantly pardon him. There are
200,000 drunkards in the United States, 40,000 of whom go annually to
premature graves. There are 20,000 prostitutes, whose average life
in their profession is four years. Do you believe this vast army of
immortals go willingly to ruin? There are causes lying back of mere
perversities of soul in the common every-day dietetic habits of these
forlorn ones.
Eating and drinking are always associated with the bar and brothel,
and if you will take notice, the eating is always of that kind of
food which goes straight for the animal nature, and wakes up in a man
everything that is beastly.
The whole tendency of the food furnished at the popular bar-room
restaurant is to stir the baser elements in humanity and keep up the
demand for alcoholic stimulants. No wonder the drinking saloons can
afford to give what they call a “free lunch.” Care is taken to furnish
such food as fires the appetite for strong drink, and the rum-seller
gets his pay for his “free lunch” through the sale of the whisky that
must inevitably follow it. Those who, living on highly stimulating
foods, but do not drink strong drinks, will find that the bias of their
bodily powers, instead of being toward mental and spiritual spheres,
will be toward animal indulgences, dragging the mind and soul into
servitude to the flesh, and where there are any moral aspirations,
making the conflict between the higher and lower nature so intense that
a vast amount of moral force is wasted in self-conflict that ought to
go into the world’s redemptive agencies for saving the lost.
I am confident that the American habit of eating sumptuous and late
suppers, whether at our homes or church fairs or festivals, is damaging
the physical, mental, and moral health of our nation more than any
other one thing of its kind; more damaging, because it has the
appearance of innocency, and the sanction of our fathers and mothers
and some of our pastors.
Furthermore, the habit of eating hurriedly, or hastily, is preying
upon the vital and moral forces of many of us. A meal eaten hastily or
nervously, under the pressure of intense mental activity or nervous
tension, or great weariness, begins its work of nutrition under the
greatest possible disadvantage. All our meals should be eaten calmly
and deliberately, so as to thoroughly masticate the food, and not
impose on the stomach and viscera the legitimate work of the teeth.
In the interest of health to soul as well as body I enter an earnest
plea for more time for eating, and especially at noon, when most hard
working people take their principal meal. Clerks, business men, and
school teachers, mechanics, laborers, and our children who attend the
public schools, need more time at noon to properly dispose of the chief
meal of the day. No better investment could be made to secure the best
possible physical, intellectual, financial, and moral returns than for
all classes of people to take two hours at mid-day for resting and
eating dinner. Selfish greed demands otherwise, and makes a show of
gain; but the loss is sure to come in due time to all parties concerned.
My friends, when will we fast-living, fast-eating, fast-working, and
fast-dying Americans learn the great lesson, that life is a unit,
that the Divine Trinity in us, namely, the physical, intellectual,
and spiritual, is one life, with different phases of expression; and
whatever mars one mars the whole, and whatever builds up one most
surely builds up the others? All our powers are many members in one
body, with an inter-dependence which is eternal. Slight your body,
and you smite your soul and enervate the mind. Corrupt the mind, and
you debase both body and soul. When will those who profess to be God’s
children by the adoption of the Holy Ghost, catch the Spirit of His
great Apostle Paul, who, more than any other sacred writer, maintained
the sanctity of the human body and its subservience to the mind and
soul. Hear him: “I beseech you, brethren, by the mercies of God that
ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God,
which is your reasonable service, and be not conformed to this world,
but be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds, that ye may prove
what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.” I admit the
power of the Holy Ghost in the work of regeneration, but is there not
something for us to do, in keeping our bodies under, “lest we become
cast-aways?” I do not say that _all_ human evils and ills have their
primary origin in physical habits, but I do say that the great mass
of impulsions from the excited, inflamed, over-stimulated body toward
the soul, are in the interests of sin. The economy of salvation orders
otherwise. By the Gospel the body may become the temple of the Holy
Ghost. By the law of self-denial of the New Testament, our bodies, with
all their fiery elements, may be made an inspiration to our souls.
It is not the purpose of God that a life-time warfare shall be kept
up between the body and the soul. There ought to come to every true
Christian a day of final victory over his bodily powers, in which they
will cease their rebellion, and come into the sweetest union with the
soul in its great work of developing a likeness to Christ.
Why are we called upon to present the body a living sacrifice to God,
if its powers are not to be sanctified to holy purposes? Why should we
spend all our life waiting for the adoption of our whole nature, to
wit, the redemption of the body, as well as the soul.
Our fondest dreams for the progress of humanity must be based in a
newly created body by strict obedience to the laws of God, written on
every fibre, tissue, muscle, and bone. We cannot develop the human
brain and heart to the possibilities that God has put in them, while
they are the tenants of bodies the laws of which are violated in the
commonest habits of every-day life.
Regeneration does a mighty work for us; but generation has also much
to do with our highest and best development. The sins of the fathers
must cease, so that the sons may be spared their terrible visitations;
the accumulated virtues of parents must roll over on their children in
purer, stronger, and better bodies until by a blessed economy the whole
race shall be exalted to heirship with Christ through loving obedience
to all the laws of physical as well as moral life.
Why may we not now, under the laws of redemption, begin to build a new
heaven and a new earth, new souls and new bodies. If our souls are
redeemed and renewed by obedience and faith, why not secure also the
redemption of our bodies? I know it is slow work to teach the subtle
but mighty elements of self-restraint. I know the flesh lusteth against
the spirit. Yet I thank God who giveth us the victory through our Lord
Jesus Christ.