Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1898).djvu/136

116 We hear it said: “I exercise daily in the open air; I take cold baths, in order to overcome a predisposition to take cold; and yet I have continual colds, catarrh, and cough.” Such admissions ought to open people's eyes to the inefficacy of hygiene, and induce them to look in other directions for cause and cure.

Instinct is better than misguided reason, as even nature declares. The violet lifts her blue eye to greet the early spring. The leaves clap their hands as nature's untired worshippers. The snowbird sings and soars amid the blasts, he has no catarrh from wet feet, and procures a summer residence with more ease than a nabob. The atmosphere of the earth, kinder than the atmosphere of mortal mind, leaves catarrh to the latter. Colds, coughs, and contagion are engendered solely by mortal belief.

Mortal mind produces its own phenomena, and then

charges them to something else, — like a kitten glancing into the mirror at herself, and thinking she sees there another kitten.

A clergyman once adopted a diet of bread and water,

to increase his spirituality. Finding his health failing, he gave up his abstinence, and advised others never to try dietetics for growth in grace.

The belief that either fasting or feasting makes men better, morally or physically, is one of the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge, concerning which God said, “Thou shalt not eat of it.” Mortal mind forms all conditions of the mortal body, and controls the stomach, bones, lungs, heart, and blood, as directly as the volition of will moves the hand.