Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.djvu/152

140 The daily ablutions of an infant are no more natural or necessary, than it would be to take a fish out of water once a day, and cover it with dirt, in order to make it thrive more vigorously thereafter in its native element. Cleanliness is next to godliness; but washing should be only for the purpose of keeping the body clean, and this can be effected without scrubbing the whole surface daily. Water is not the natural habitat of humanity.

Giving drugs to infants, noticing every symptom of flatulency, and constantly directing your mind to such signs, — that mind being laden with illusions about disease, health-laws, and death, — these actions convey your mental images to your children's bodies, and often stamp them there, making it probable that, at any time, such ills may be reproduced in the very ailments you fear.

Your child can have worms, if you say so, — or whatever malady is timorously holden in your mind, relative to the body. Thus you lay the foundations of disease and death, and educate your child into discord. The entire education of children should be such as will form habits of obedience to moral and spiritual law, whereby to meet and master that belief in so-called physical laws, which breeds disease.

Taking less “thought for the body, what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink,” will do much more than you dream of for the health of the rising generation. Children should be allowed to remain children in knowledge, and become men and women through the understanding of man's spiritual being. We must not assign more and more intelligence to