Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.djvu/42

30 à la Cutter, or considered a law of the human mind. A man's belief in those days was not so severe upon the gastric juices. Beaumont's Experiments did not govern the digestion.

The action of mind on the body was not so injurious before the curing and curious Eves embraced medical works, and the unmanly Adams charged their falls, and the fate of their offspring, upon the credulity of their wives.

The primitive privilege, to take no thought about food, left the stomach and bowels free to act in obedience to nature, and gave the gospel a chance to be seen in its glorious effects upon the body. A ghastly array of diseases was not kept before the imagination. Fewer books on digestion, and more “sermons in stones and good in everything,” gave better health and greater longevity to our forefathers. When the mechanism of the human mind goes on undisturbed by fear, selfishness, or malice, disease cannot enter and gain a foothold.

Damp atmospheres and freezing snows may have empurpled the round cheeks of our ancestors, but they never reached the refinement of inflamed bronchial tubes; because they were as ignorant as Adam, before he was told by his wife that there were such things as tubes or troches, lungs or lozenges.

The Nineteenth Century would load with disease the air of Eden, and hunt mankind down with superimposed airs and conjectural evils. Mind is at once the best friend and the worst foe of the body, and Truth the universal healer.

Shall a regular practitioner treat all the cases of organic disease, and the Christian Scientist try his hand