Page:Medicine and the church; being a series of studies on the relationship between the practice of medicine and the church's ministry to the sick (IA medicinechurchbe00rhodiala).pdf/125

 the maintenance of its nervous and mental stability.

The problem, however, has a different aspect for those who by habit and heredity are trained for city life, and certain it is that increased facilities for travelling are tending to decentralise our cities and thereby render the city dwellers healthier and more fit to cope with the drain upon their nervous energies. As a physician, it would appear to the writer that the problem of Sunday observances in town and country have different bearings on the health and physical fitness of the people. There is no doubt that periodic decentralisation of town dwellers is essential to the maintenance of bodily health, and it is also true that physical exercise and change from mental to physical functioning and vice versa is essential to all—i.e. if the balance between the mental and physical powers is to be adequately maintained. It is, of course, to be understood that to a physician the preservation of this balance is his first care, and to him is entrusted the function of aiding in the proper observance of all that is in agreement with biological and, therefore, natural laws. To him there is a great difference between 'observance' and 'belief'; and he sees in them either mutually co-operative