Page:Macfadden's Fasting, Hydropathy and Exercise.djvu/44

38 from stimulants should sign a pledge against tea and coffee, while they are about it.

Only unnatural appetencies have no natural limits, and a combination of dietetic restrictions with the one-meal plan would enable us to dispense with the sickening cant of the saints who ask us to make our dinners as many ordeals for the exercise of self-denial. "It would justify suicide," says an educational reformer, "if this world of ours were really arranged on the diabolic plan of making every gratification of our natural instincts injurious."

"Stop eating whenever the taste of a special dish tempts you to unusual indulgence." . . . "In saying grace, add in silence a pledge to prove your self-control;" "test the superiority of moral principles to physical appetites," and similar apothegms recall the time when moralists tried to earn heaven by trampling the strawberry patches of earth and obtain forgiveness for eating at all by mixing their food with a decoction of wormwood. "Stop eating when you relish your food more than usually?" Nego et pernego! We might as well tell a health-seeker to refrain from sleep when he feels specially drowsy.

"Regulate the quality of your meals and let