Page:Letters on the Human Body (John Clowes).djvu/144

124 by being next elevated into the understanding, which is to believe in it; and lastly by allowing it the supreme rule and ascendancy in the will and life, which is to become its children!

Whilst then, in the spirit of profound humiliation and adoration, we magnify that inconceivable goodness and wisdom, which devised and constructed the bodily organs of bodily digestion, absorption, and secretion, for the purpose of promoting bodily health and strength, may we ever be wise to recollect, that these organs and their operations are but figures of those more astonishing powers of the mind, by which it is enabled to exercise mental digestion, absorption, and secretion, in regard to that which is given in the  for its daily sustenance! May the reception of this be accordingly our grand concern! And may we never forget, that if there be one folly more extravagant or more perilous than another, it is the folly of supposing, that a medicine can be of any use to a sick man whilst he keeps it in his pocket, instead of taking it into his stomach, and allowing it there to exercise its healing, digesting, and secreting properties; or that food can be of any benefit to a hungry man, so long as, like the Syrian lord,