Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.djvu/108

96 and apostle. If those wonders are not repeated to-day, it is not so much from lack of desire as from lack of spiritual understanding.

A clergyman adopted a diet of bread and water to increase his spirituality. Finding his health failing he gave up his abstinence, and recommended others never to try dietetics for growth in grace.

I knew a woman who, when quite a child, adopted the Graham system to cure dyspepsia. She ate bread and vegetables only, and drank nothing but water for many years. Her dyspepsia increasing, she decided that her diet should be more rigid, and thereafter she partook of but one meal in twenty-four hours, this meal consisting of only a thin slice of bread, without water. Her physician recommended, with this ample meal, that she should not wet her parched throat within three hours subsequent to eating. After passing many weary years in hunger, in weakness, almost in starvation, she made up her mind to eat freely and die, having exhausted the skill of the medicine-men, who kindly informed her that death was indeed the only alternative. At this point Christian Science saved her, and she is now in perfect health, without a vestige of the old complaint.

She learned that suffering and disease are the self-imposed beliefs of mortals, and not the facts of being — that God never made disease, or a law that ordains fasting as a means of health. Hence semi-starvation is not acceptable to wisdom; and it is equally far from Science, in which Soul governs sense. These truths, opening this woman's eyes, relieved also her stomach, and she ate without suffering, giving God thanks. But she never