Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/101

 between the bite and the dreadful moment when, gathering demoniac force, the effects rush forth in such appalling horror as to fright the souls of bravest men. Why? Because the alkali dissolves the virus, expels it from the body, and brings back the angular globules to their normal chemical condition, and therefore shape. By the application of the same principle, consumption and the pale train that accompanies its deadly march is surely robbed of all its terrors, and we need no longer be horrified by the spectacle of millions of graves of people cut off by that fell pest in the midst of life and youth.

"Wilful waste makes woful want; yet to those who chew and smoke their lives away, these principles afford the only known and positive refuge; while that larger class, who, in youth and ignorance, have sapped their own lives, manliness, womanhood, beauty, courage, health, and power, — who have sacrificed themselves on the altar of a deceptive, ruinous, and pernicious private pleasure, —the baneful habit of solitary vice, — in these principles and their agencies have probably their sole and only earthly salvation. [And here let me caution parents and guardians to treat these erring ones as patients, not as quasi criminals, for the trouble is chemical, not psychical, and kindness is better than its opposite, in their, as all other, cases; for a kind word, fitly spoken, may change the whole career of a human being. When it is remembered that it is as easy to speak a kind as any other sort of word, and also reflect how in one case it may do worlds of good, or in the other worlds of evil, is it not strange that so few of the former and so many of the latter are uttered? It is true that words are only air, but air sometimes suffocates and destroys. If rightly compounded and good, it gives life and strength; if otherwise, it enfeebles and kills. Think how much you may do with a kind word, and then go and utter them, for there are waiting opportunities on the right hand and left of you, and this, above all, in cases where from folly or moral accident erring ones have tampered with their own lives and happiness, as I believe, here, and after death has transported them beyond the darksome river.]

The whole and only secret of this revolutionary theory of diseases and their remedies is, briefly: oxygen is heat, light and electricity in unitary form. When it and phosogen are present in the body in proper quantity, it acts as a solvent to all morbid